ÆäÀÌÁö À̹ÌÁö
PDF
ePub
[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small]

POETRY.-Fairy Children, 290. Fallen Leaves, 290. The Republic, 335. The Warriors to the Women, 336.

SHORT ARTICLES.-Use of Naphtha in Increasing the Lighting Power of Coal Gas, 318.

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

LITTELL, SON, & CO., BOSTON.

For Six Dollars a year, in advance, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded free of postage.

Complete sets of the First Series, in thirty-six volumes, and of the Second Series, in twenty volumes, handsomely bound, packed in neat boxes, and delivered in all the principal cities, free of expense of freight, are for sale at two dollars a volume.

ANY VOLUME may be had separately, at two dollars, bound, or a dollar and a half in numbers.

ANY NUMBER may be had for 13 cents; and it is well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to complete any broken volumes they may have, and thus greatly enhance their value.

[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

Some are but weakly babes, and die in teething,

Of measles some-half-mortal babes can die.
These fade away, in their decease bequeathing
What little strength they had to those still
breathing,

So that the remnant lustier wax thereby.
Here these love-children dwell, and day by day
From stage to stage, like earthlier children,
growing-

Ah me! we men respectable and portly,

Whom none suspect of having souls at all; Who speak dull platitudes in accents courtly, Or mouldy truths sententiously and shortly; Whose young romance seems dead beyond recall;

We ancient fogies, whom the youngsters think Mere pulpy husks with no informing kernel, Whose only functions are to eat and drink, Write cheques alive, make wills upon the brink Of death-we have our mysteries internal. The bird doth not betray its nest, but flutters

Afar. Thus we our fairy broods conceal; Closing o'er conscious eyes opaquest shutters, Locking set lips, through which a tied tongue

inutters

The opposites of what we really feel. We live an inward life that shows no sign; We have a sense beyond the outward senses, Which recognizes essences more fine And subtle than the senses five combine

To render through the dull exterior fences. We have our fairy children, still the dearer That we have reared the bantlings from their birth

In silence, babbling to no careless hearer
The sacred secret of a kindred nearer
Than those most loved who bear our name on
earth.
-Once a Week.

FALLEN LEAVES.

WEARY, the cloud droopeth down from the sky,
Dreary, the leaf lieth low;

All things must come to the earth by-and-by,
Out of which all things grow.

Let the wild wind shriek and whistle

Down aisles of the leafless wood;

In our garden let the thistle

Start where the rose-tree stood;

Let the rotting mass fall rotten

With the rain-drops from the eaves;
Let the dead Past lie forgotten

In his grave with the yellow leaves, Weary, the cloud droopeth down from the sky, Dreary, the leaf lieth low:

All things must come to the earth by-and-by,
Out of which all things grow.

And again the hawthorn pale

Shall blossom sweet in the spring;
And again the nightingale

In the long blue nights shall sing;
And seas of the wind shall wave

In the light of the golden grain ;
But the love that is gone to the grave
Shall never return again.

Weary, the cloud droopeth out of the sky,
Dreary, the leaf lieth low;

First word, first step, each progress on the way
That all must tread who have a touch of clay-All things must come to the earth by-and-by,
They set their father's pride in triumph glow-

ing.

Out of which all things grow.

-All the Year Round.

From The Christian Remembrancer.

1. History of the Life and Times of Edmund Burke. By Thomas Macknight. Vol. III. London: Chapman and Hall. 1860.

and that each particular act of iniquity perpetrated under the auspices of uncontrolled power, thousands of miles away, could be brought under the cognizance and condemnation of the British Legislature. That

2. Recollections and Private Memoirs of there was something theatrical and unreal
Washington. By his adopted soul,
George Washington Parke Custis.
New York: Derby and Jackson. 1860.

in the display was not Burke's fault, but incident to the very essence of the matter; and the same may be said for the unexampled prolixity of the proceedings, and the

WE join these two volumes under one notice, rather for the contrast, than for the re-final vagueness of the result. The trial itsemblance between them; because, that is, self seems scarcely to have been projected the two heroes of them were so very unlike, by Burke. We are told that he did not bethough each a thorough representative of the lieve it possible to convict Hastings, or that Anglo-Saxon race, and their fortunes so very it would ever have come to an impeachment. unequal, though the genius of each was, in He only wanted to have his charges supits kind, equally pre-eminent. Because, fur-ported by a respectable minority in the Comther, the one book, being a fair sample of mons, and this seemed to him a sufficient the school of biography, which assumes it to justification. And so it seems to us; and, be merely a special portion of history, is well also, that "all the conjectures about his written, and yet tells us so little; the other wishing to avenge on Hastings the downfall (the American), a specimen of the more of the Coalition Ministry, and thus retrieve personal and anecdotal kind, is faulty in the fortunes of the field, are not supported style, and yet tells us so much. by facts."

Mr. Macknight's third and concluding volume embraces the period of Burke's life marked by his efforts against Warren Hastings, and the progress of the French Revolution. Our generation, which has forgotten his labors for purging Parliament of its place and pension mongering scandals, and has received from the somewhat ungrateful Whig party but very slender intimations of his less public task of cementing that party, under the auspices of Lord Rockingham, and of teaching it what its principles really were and must grow into, still is attracted by, and inquires into his part and standingpoint in those mighty events.

Yet, in the conduct of the case, his demeanor appears to us open to the gravest censure. We do not think, with Mr. Macknight, that when the Opposition endeavored to force into the number of its managers, Francis, the late Governor's deadly enemy, it was a weak reply of Pitt to Windham, that "however gentlemen might reason, there was a feeling against appointing a man who had certainly been an enemy of Hastings, and had met him in mortal conflict, one of his public prosecutors;" on the contrary, Burke's persistency in demanding such a selection was grossly indecent; and the argument, that the Commons were not The great achievement of Burke's career judges, but simply prosecutors, merely sois popularly considered to be the prosecution phistical, it being altogether opposed to the of Warren Hastings; he himself seems to practice and spirit, if not to the letter, of have so esteemed it. It was, indeed, the ordinary law, to have for an advocate darling of his old age, when he was now against the accused his own personal foe. losing authority, and sometimes even respect, Exception should, on yet deeper principles in the House of Commons. It was the last of justice, be taken to the statesman's congreat occasion on which, when now disowned duct during the progress, and on the conclualmost by his old disciples of the Whig sion of the prosecution. What possible party, he once more stood forward as their right could a prosecutor have to retort even acknowledged leader. In the features of the an insult to himself, by branding the accused case there was something grandly poetical as "that wicked wretch, that scourge of Inand, also, apparently practical. It was to dia, that criminal; " or, still further, to be shown by the trial, that a nation could struggle against the design of reimbursing kindle with the sentiment of compassion the acquitted statesman the cost of his deand the love of justice, like an individual; fence. It appears to us the most apparent

292

equity, that when a public servant had been great offences had been perpetrated against absolved, after many years of the most ago- that British theory of the morality of gornizing anxiety, and after having been for ernment, which no Englishman has a right all that time proposed as a mark for the wit to disavow on the shallow principle that the and declamation of the greatest, and, if we corresponding duties of subjects are not think of Sheridan, we may say, not always recognized in the East; and we certainly the most conscientious of orators, and de- shall not worry our readers with repetitions clared to be innocent of every wickedness of this crambe repetita any more than with laid to his charge, the nation in whose cause prolix disquisitions on the authorship of he had incurred the odium-which the same Junius. But the question of the propriety people, by its highest court of judicature, of Burke's obstinate resistance to the gracehad pronounced to be baseless-should at ful act of parliamentary benevolence, in penleast make the small atonement in its power, sioning the victim of the inherent lengthiby paying debts which, but for services per-ness of a prosecution for the misgovernformed on its behalf, he would never have ment of a great empire, is one of a very accumulated. It may be said (Burke, in- different nature. deed, was always assuming it) that, though acquitted, he was guilty. We think this not at all improbable; but how is such an allegation to the point? It is not allowed in the interest of ordinary plaintiffs in civil disputes, it is equally unnatural in criminal causes, first to confirm and recognize the authority of judges, by bringing the matter before them, and as soon as a sentence contrary to one's wishes has been uttered, to disclaim it. Either no verdict against Hastings could have been fairly carried into execution, or a verdict for him should have been allowed by the prosecutors to have been effectual. The theory of a trial is, that the accusers—in this case, the managers for the House of Commons-believe a crime to have been committed, and by a particular person, but that by carrying the thing before a court, they make it an umpire between them and the accused. When the sentence of acquittal was given by this court, it was entirely illogical in Burke to argue Macknight confesses, his temper grew worse that the minister's report to the House of Commons to carry into effect, as it were, the sentence, by putting the late governor into the same position pecuniarily as he was in before the proceedings commenced-was "a kind of censure upon the managers of the impeachment, and a practical contradiction 99

of hearing of this trial, which had no direct Mankind have become pardonably weary result, and the use of which in history seems rather too like that of an exhibition of waxworks, to introduce, that is, a fine pageant of great names and sounding titles, not to illustrate the character of their bearers, or of their times. The one point of interest in it is any light which may possibly be thrown from it upon the character of the great orator whose energy in reality created it. His fervid imagination, we doubt not, was influenced by the splendid spectacle, equally with the spectators who made part of it, and those who now read of it in Macaulay's noble essay; but it was assuredly not for the sake of a grand occasion for display that he took the front rank in the solemnity. The ardor of his fancy must not be confounded with vanity; it maddened him when he probed into the intricacies of statesmanship in an Asiatic dependency; so that, Mr.

with the anxiety of the impeachment, and he showed himself, "on many occasions, more violent and intemperate than any of his political associates." The details of despotism were so vividly present to his mind, that he could not understand how, except from guilty obstinacy, they did not work the to the vote that an impeachment same effect of wrath against the offender in should be conducted; that is, a vote, not the hearts of all his contemporaries. But that Hastings was guilty, but that there was this was no new feature in his character, or sufficient appearance of guilt to warrant a even his conduct. As his biographer obsolemn judicial inquiry into it. This is a serves of the harshness of the "Letter to a point to which, we believe, not enough atten- noble Lord," so now, "it was the grief ittion has been generally directed. We con- self which produced the bitterness,"-the cur with the common conclusion of our grief of seeing himself virtually abandoned times, and, indeed, of contemporaries, that by his old associates, and admired only for

the philosophic faculty of theorizing which of any effect. The phenomenon, however, men of theory themselves so very commonly of a man of great genius coveting and asare the most inclined to despise. But it serting the possession of practical ability was only in degree that any change in his when he has it not, is by no means so undemeanor can be allowed to have taken common as to afford reasonable room for place at this time. Robert Hall was right the mistake so often made by their admirers in declaring that those who had studied in assenting to their pretensions. Burke carefully Burke's earlier works, had little clearly saw the faults of a system: the fault reason for astonishment at his subsequent of the Tories in continuing an useless conconduct. He was at all times a Cassandra, flict with the colonies; the fault of the Radpreaching without result: and the true icals of the era of the French Revolution in causes of this phenomenon in his fortunes their wild doctrine of universal equality. may be traced in his disposition. He him- His vision was so clear, that he felt himself self was ever fond of saying, that he "hated an inspired opponent of these errors of parthe very sound of an abstract principle;" ties; but it naturally escaped his observathat he was no enthusiast, but a sober, tion, that, as his adversaries had gone wrong reflecting man ;" and of holding himself by consulting their prejudices, so he had deout, so far as accordant with morality, as a tected their aberrations by the aid of counprofessor of expediency. Yet this was the ter-prejudices in himself, and which, suffered man who harangued powerfully against the to stray uncontrolled, would have led a war with America, for the condemnation of statesman, with real power in his hands, Warren Hastings, for a war with the French into equally dangerous extremes. It would Revolutionists, and whose plans and arguments on all three occasions proved, in appearance, conspicuously without issue. The truth is, that he had a great genius for the philosophy of statesmanship, and great insight into human character, but very little power of sifting the relation between the nature of particular individuals and of the circumstances in which they were to act. It was with him, as it might be with a chemist in a dyeing factory: the man of science could well expound the general effects of a special application, but not apply the rule to an individual object as skilfully as the workman to whom practice has given a new instinct of sight and touch. The fact that his pleadings produced so little effect must have been apparent enough to the orator; but he always refused to refer this to any defect in his own tactics.

be paradoxical to deny him the possession of judgment altogether, for an acute critical power, in relation both to men and measures, is one of his most distinguishing characteristics; but what he failed in, was the habit, and perhaps the faculty, of applying this critical sagacity to himself. He might preside at the council of war, and give the watchword; but a much cooler head, a man who could see the strong as well as the weak points in an enemy's defences, was needed to command in action. Inconsistency, it is true, cannot fairly be imputed to him; at least, not that inconsistency which can in any way diminish men's opinion of a statesman's good faith. As we look back from this vantage-ground of almost a century onward, we perceive that Burke was right in opposing Grenville's administration on their American policy, not so entirely without a Mr. Macknight appears to concur thor- defence for aiding in the formation of the oughly in Burke's own estimate of his prac- Coalition Ministry, right in his attacks on tical skill. Because he forced the House of the exercise of royal prerogative by which Commons to vote the impeachment of the that cabinet was shattered, and right again late governor-general of India, he thinks he in attacking the assaults upon royal prerogwas completely successful, though the trial ative in France and in England by advanced ended in the acquittal of the accused. On Radicals. But is this circumstance, viz., the same principle, Lord George Gordon that inconsistency cannot be brought home might claim to be released from the limbo to a man, by itself evidence of great statesof lunatic enthusiasts, in which he is still man-like powers? If statesmanship consists confined by the verdict of posterity, on the in governing men, it certainly is not. Beground that he succeeded in raising an agi- sides many other qualities, it is not suffitation, though he could not make it fruitful cient merely to support the opinion on the

« ÀÌÀü°è¼Ó »