text:
Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/115

Rh Unseen, unknown, unsensed, ineffable;

And all my being with bright passion shook.

Such moments, like the heavenly messenger,

Announce a birth divine; they cannot die;

And never after faded that pure ray.

It crept on human faces, forms of youth,

The smile of woman, hero, saint, and child,

And lit my youth from many a great design

Of mighty artists, where the risen soul,

Above the tomb as on a pedestal

Seated immortal, waited heaven's ascent;

Or crosses, on Judæan mounts relieved,

Led up the eye; or golden clouds enthroned

Virgin and martyr,—Italy enskied

Above her long-lined hills; but most it shone,

Where marble forms immovable of gods

Stayed the one moment of eternity

That ever is, and flashed through time and tide

The radiant presence of a greater world

Of timeless beauty, omnipresent thought,

The element of immortality,

Wherein the universe is lightly borne.

Then came a greater wonder. The ideal

Shone on me from the living forms of men

More than from paint, or clay, or gleaming stone,

Or the fair shapes that light the brooding mind.


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/6

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/6


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/7

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/7


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/8

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/8


text:
Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/116

106 I met them in the highways of the world,

Maiden and youth and child, hero and saint,

Sweetened by duty, crowned by sacrifice,

And most that glory rested on the poor;—

The changeless type more easily discerned,

Made flesh. So love had taught my mortal eyes."

The sun had sunk, and left a winter light,

Pure emerald, lucid in the delicate deep,

Transparent, crystalline, save where the peak

Clothed the pale North with an outstretching glow,

And the far East was barred with crimson flakes.

"More than the object doth the eye avail,

If but the sight be pure," that fair guest spoke,

And more his gentle smile left unexpressed;

"With such a light is every mortal born,

As well thou provest in thy wanderings;

And if he follow the all-heavenly ray,

He shall behold, though far, the Mount Divine,

The Mount of Vision, where my dwelling is,

The place of the Transfiguration old.

Lift up thy eyes, and see! lo, I am he,

The angel of the Intercessors called,

And in my charge all things of beauty are.

Swift must my going be out of thy sight,

Brief my farewell." He nigh the Roamer drew,

And touched his flesh, and raised his eyelids up


text:
Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/117

Rh With hands, whose tender stroke was burning fire.

The mountain-cone was swathed in sunset flame,

As with a mantle; opalescent gleamed

The dying skies; one white and tremulous star

From light emerging, pale with quivering points,

Hung faint upon the orange edge of night,

Whereon the angel gazed; lovely in him,

The form of beauty full incarnate glowed,

The bloom of all desire: instant he passed.

"O, is the beauty of the evening star

The path of thy departure, spirit fair?"—

The Roamer spoke with syllables unheard.

Horizon-low, the heavenly planet shone,

And sank; far off the sweet light died away.

Night fell, the visionary peak went out;

About the Roamer a great darkness drew;

Lonely, he turned to his dim hostel, sleep,

And laid his head upon the dreamer's stone.


text: The roamer and other poems/The Roamer/Book III


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/11

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/11


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/12

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/12


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/13

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/13


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/14

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/14


text:
Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/96

86 (herein touched with the decadence) breathes the self-glorifying spirit of triumphant skill, rather than the overmastering idealism of the earlier patriotic and religious motives. In their pictorial composition and landscape backgrounds, also, one is tempted to discern the harmful influence of that so vaguely known school of painting that flourished in the preceding period, and to piece out by conjecture our fragmentary conceptions of its manner. It is complained that modern sculpture is too pictorial; almost as soon as the art was recovered in Italy it fell into the same error, particularly in relief work; but in Greece the profuse use of color on the marble, as ground and also for direct decoration, together with the employment of metals and jewels as additional adornment, must have brought the two arts so closely together that the transference of modes of treatment was inevitable. The striking thing is that painting, then as now, seems by its greater compass to overpower its more hampered rival.

Besides this tendency to overtax the power of expression by the weight of subject, and this pride in mere technique in close association with a humiliating imitation of a


text:
Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/97

Rh art, these Pergamon sculptures display other marks of being essentially quite modern. Their realism is especially noticeable. The Greeks of the elder time, it must be acknowledged, were remarkably fortunate in that their realistic spirit fell in with an actual existence which itself appealed to the imagination in many ways. In the Athenian prime the life that taught Sophocles and Agathon was heroic or idyllic, and needed hardly a touch to exalt its elements into the most imaginative idealism. When Plato could not write a dialogue without making a drama, nor Aristophanes compose a comedy without breaking into the sweetest lyric song, nor Phidias chisel a flying fold except for eternity, a presence was upon the earth and a spirit in men that made realism not less trustworthy as a guide to sculptors than is the "Look into thy heart and write" as a maxim for poets like Sidney. But when the barbarians broke in from the north upon Asia Minor, and the luxury of oriental manners and the fantasies of oriental mind stole upon the old order and changed it, to study the real was not necessarily to achieve the beautiful. The barbarians chiseled by the Pergamon sculptors are very different


text:
Page:The American Indian.djvu/457

Rh

, and

, and

, and

title: Page:The American Indian.djvu/457


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/15

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/15


text:
Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/98

88 from those that once adorned the Parthenon: they are fierce, ugly, portrait-like, studied from the life. The giants, too, by the same artists are not even altogether human, as in the older reliefs, but many are monstrous: conglomerates of snaky folds and Titanic limbs and ox necks, finny wings, pointed ears, horns, and such Egyptian and Assyrian confusions. For this debasement of the type, few will consider the wonderful finish, the minute and successful imitation of fur, scale, and stuff, a compensation. So, too, the representation of mortal agony is, in these works, carried to an extreme of truthfulness that is upon the verge of the revolting. This new bent of realism which, ceasing to select from the beautiful in life, now takes these three directions,—toward the portraiture of types not noble, toward the close copying of accessories not important, and toward the reproduction of shocking aspects of existence, this essential difference between the art of Athens and of Pergamon, it would be but too easy to parallel in more than one province of our own intellectual life. These remarks, although they were not meant to point such a moral, incidentally illustrate how misleading is the


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/16

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/16


text:
Page:EB1911 - Volume 02.djvu/289

 important Book of Classes of his disciple (q.v.). Wāqidī had much more copious materials than Ibn Isḥāq, but gives way much more to a popular and sometimes romancing style of treatment. Nevertheless he sometimes helps us to recognize in Ibn Isḥāq’s narrative modifications of the genuine tradition made for a purpose, and the additional details he supplies set various events before us in a clearer light. Apart from this his chief merits lie in his studies on the subject of the traditional authorities, the results of which are given by Ibn Saʽd, and in his chronology, which is often excellent. A special study of the traditions about the conquest of Syria made by M. J. de Goeje in 1864 (Mémoires sur la conquête de la Syrie, 2nd ed., Leiden, 1900), led to the conclusion that Wāqidī’s chronology is sound as regards the main events, and that later historians have gone astray by forsaking his guidance. This result has been confirmed by certain contemporary notices found by Th. Nöldeke in 1874 in a Syriac MS. of the British Museum. And that Ibn Isḥāq agrees with Wāqidī in certain main dates is important evidence for the trustworthiness of the former also. For the chronology before the year 10 of the Flight Wāqidī did his best, but here, the material being defective, many of his conclusions are precarious. Wāqidī had already a great library at his disposal. He is said to have had 600 chests of books, chiefly dictata written by or for himself, but in part real books by Abū Mikhnaf (d. 748), Ibn Isḥāq (whom he uses but does not name), ʽAwāna (d. 764), Abū Mashar (d. 791) and other authors. Abū Mikhnaf left a great number of monographs on the chief events from the death of the Prophet to the caliphate of Walīd II. These were much used by later writers, and we have many extracts from them, but none of the works themselves except a sort of romance based on his account of the death of Hosain (Ḥusain) of which Wüstenfeld has given a translation. With regard to the history of Irak in particular he was deemed to have the best information, and for this subject he is Ṭabarī’s chief source, just as Madāinī, a younger contemporary of Wāqidī, is followed by preference in all that relates to Khorasan. Madāinī’s History of the Caliphs is the best, if not the oldest, published before Ṭabarī; but this book is known only by the excerpts given by later writers, particularly Balādhurī and Ṭabarī. From these we judge that he had great narrative power, with much clear and exact learning, and must be placed high as a critical historian. His plan was to record the various traditions about an event, choosing them with critical skill; sometimes, however, he fused the several traditions into a continuous narrative. A just estimate of the relative value of the historians can only be reached by careful comparison in detail. This has been essayed by Brünnow in his study on the Khārijites (Leiden, 1884), in which the narrative of Mubarrad in the Kāmil is compared with the excerpts of Mādainī given by Balādhurī and those of Abū Mikhnaf given by Ṭabarī. The conclusion reached is that Abū Mikhnaf and Mādainī are both well informed and impartial.

Among the contemporaries of Wāqidī and Mādainī were Ibn Khidāsh (d. 838), the historian of the family Muhallab, whose work was one of Mubarrad’s sources for the History of the Khārijites; Haitham ibn ʽAdī (d. 822), whose works, though now lost, are often cited; and Saif ibn ʽOmar at-Tamīmī, whose book on the revolt of the tribes under Abu-Bekr and on the Mahommedan conquests was much used by Ṭabarī. His narratives are detailed and often tinged with romance, and he is certainly much inferior to Wāqidī in accuracy. Wellhausen has thoroughly examined the work of Saif in Skizzen und Vorarbeiten, vi. Besides these are to be mentioned Abū ʽUbaida (d. 825), who was celebrated as a philologist and wrote several historical monographs that are often cited, and Azraqī, whose excellent History of Mecca was published after his death by his grandson (d. 858). With these writers we pass into the 3rd century of Islam. But we have still an important point to notice in the 2nd century; for in it learned Persians began to take part in the creation of Arabic historical literature. Ibn Muqaffaʽ translated the great Book of Persian Kings, and others followed his example. Ṭabarī and his contemporaries, senior and junior, such as Ibn Qutaiba, Yaʽqūbī, Dīnawarī, preserve to us a good part of the information about Persian history made known through such translations. But even more important than the knowledge conveyed by these works was their influence on literary style and composition. Half a century later began versions from the Greek either direct or through the Syriac. The pieces translated were mostly philosophical; but the Arabs also learned something, however superficially, of ancient history.

The 3rd century (816–913) was far more productive than the 2nd. Abū ʽUbaida was succeeded by Ibn al-Aʽrābī (d. 846), who in like manner was chiefly famous as a philologist, and who wrote about ancient poems and battles. Much that he wrote is quoted in Tabrīzī’s commentary on the Ḥamāsa, which is still richer in extracts from the historical elucidations of early poems given by ar-Riyāshī (d. 871). Of special fame as a genealogist was Ibn Ḥabīb (d. 859), of whom we have a booklet on Arabian tribal names (ed. Wüstenfeld, 1850). Azraqī again was followed by Fākihī, who wrote a History of Mecca in 885, and ʽOmar b. Shabba (d. 876), who composed an excellent history of Baṣra, known to us only by excerpts. Of the works of Zubair b. Bakkār (d. 870), one of Ṭabarī’s teachers, a learned historian and genealogist much consulted by later writers, there is a fragment in the Köprülü library at Constantinople, and another in Göttingen, part of which has been made known by Wüstenfeld (Die Familie Al-Zobair, Göttingen, 1878). Yaʽqūbī (Ibn Wāḍiḥ) wrote a short general history of much value (published by Houtsma, Leiden, 1883). About India he knows more than his predecessors and more than his successors down to Berūnī. Ibn Khordādhbeh’s historical works are lost. Ibn ʽAbdalḥakam (d. 871) wrote of the conquest of Egypt and the West. Extracts from this book are given by M‘G. de Slane in his Histoire des Berbères, from which we gather that it was a medley of true tradition and romance, and must be reckoned, with the book of his slightly senior contemporary, the Spaniard Ibn Ḥābīb, in the class of historical romances. A high place must be assigned to the historian Ibn Qutaiba or Kotaiba (d. 889), who wrote a very useful Handbook of History (ed. Wüstenfeld, Göttingen, 1850). Much more eminent is Balādhurī (d. 893), whose book on the Arab conquest (ed. M. J. de Goeje, Leiden, 1865–1866) merits the special praise given to it by Masʽūdī, and who also wrote a large work, the Ansāb al-Ashrāf. A contemporary, Ibn abī Tāhir Taifūr (d. 894), wrote on the Abbasid caliphs and was drawn on by Ṭabarī. The sixth part of his work is in the British Museum. The universal history of Dīnawarī (d. 896), entitled The Long Narratives, has been edited by Girgas (1887).

All these histories are more or less thrown into the shade by the great work of (q.v.), whose fame has never faded from his own day to ours. The Annals (ed. M. de Goeje, Leiden, 1879–1901) are a general history from the creation to 302 (=  915). As a literary composition they do not rank very high, which may be due partly to the author’s years, partly to the inequality of his sources, sometimes superabundant, sometimes defective, partly perhaps to the somewhat hasty condensation of his original draft. Nevertheless the value of the book is very great: the author’s selection of traditions is usually happy, and the episodes of most importance are treated with most fulness of detail, so that it deserves the high reputation it has enjoyed from the first. This reputation rose steadily; there were twenty copies (one of them written by Ṭabarī’s own hand) in the library of the Fatimite caliph ʽAziz (latter half of the 4th century), whereas, when Saladin became lord of Egypt, the princely library contained 1200 copies (Maqrīzī, i. 408 seq.).

The Annals soon came to be dealt with in various ways. They were published in shorter form with the omission of the names of authorities and of most of the poems cited; some passages quoted by later writers are not found even in the Leiden edition. On the other hand, some interpolations took place, one in the

title: Page:EB1911 - Volume 02.djvu/289


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/52

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/52


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/51

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/51


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/50

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/50


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/49

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/49


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/48

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/48


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/47

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/47


text:
Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/100

90 in proportion to the increase and continuity of exclusively literary culture in the individual, until the point is reached at which a man thinks without having a single image definitely projected upon the mind's eye; his mental processes are, in fact, as colorless and formless as algebraic calculations. Mr. Galton's experiments in this matter are still fresh in our memories. Now it is not to be inferred that this was always the case, nor indeed that the intellect of highest development may not in the past, at least, have habitually thought in images, as the unlettered do to-day; and in Greece it appears that the picture language of the mind, as one may call it, held a place more important than with us, and perhaps equivalent to our own idea language. The Greek, as every one knows, peopled the earth with presiding geniuses, of more or less exalted rank, from Oread and Naiad, to the great Zeus of Olympus. These forms we call imaginary, and to our thought they are always tenuous; the point to be remembered is that, when the Greek spoke of Athene, an image came before his mind, and one not hypothetical and consciously symbolical, like Liberty with her cap, but definite, real, and awful, like the


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/46

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/46


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/45

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/45


text:
Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/44

While th e moonbeams prattle, I hear a rattle

Of hoofs on th e chimney side;

Then out on th e show I gaze below,

"Hurrah! its Kris Kringle," I cried.

Then, sly as a mouse, h e entered the house,

And hung up his treasures so gay.

Then out with a dash, he sped lik e a flash,

Int o the night, and away.

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/44


text:
Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/101

Rh statue on the pediment or in the temple. The Greek mind leaned on these images as our mind does on the alphabet in all mental life; hence the poetry and the art of the age had a certain ease and naturalness, an intimacy with things seen by the eye, not equaled in the work of later times, except possibly in Italy. Dr. Waldstein points out that the most striking expression of this plastic necessity, inherent in Greek thinking, is the doctrine of Platonic ideas. To the moderns, however tolerant they may be, there seems always a childishness, a grotesque quality, the more marked because of Plato's splendid and rich endowment, in the continual insistence in his philosophy on the "ideas" of the table and the flute,—the table without any definite number of legs, the flute without any particular quality of sound; and the case is not much helped, even if one perceives, as Schopenhauer shows, that the doctrine is essentially accurate in truth, and wholly intelligible, since it is merely the modern statement of the subjectivity of time and space put conversely. Notwithstanding these admissions, our minds still find the Platonic ideas awkward to deal with. But that Plato, at the end of his


text:
Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/102

92 speculations, and at the threshold of one of the greatest generalizations of the human intellect, fell back upon the image-forming faculty, and insisted on particularizing the universal by means of a mystery or fiction of thought, is a crowning proof of the pervasiveness and inner mastery of the plastic spirit in the culture of his civilization.

This trait of the Greeks has been dwelt on, in the present instance, less for itself than for its bearing on the idealism of the art of Phidias, of which the marbles of the Parthenon are the great examples. Of course Dr. Waldstein, who knows the value of this supreme achievement of the idealistic temperament in man, is himself an idealist, and when he has occasion to analyze the monuments treats at more or less length of the theory of idealism. He distinguishes at once two kinds of physical representation, the portrait and the type, and affirms an analogous difference in representations of the spirit that animates the stone, the man as he is, and the man as he ought to be. He observes, too, that the Greeks were fortunately supplied with subjects of sculpture in which both the physical and spiritual perfection of man were proper elements, and,


text:
Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/103

Rh, requisite; namely, the heroes and the gods. The higher life was the theme of their art in its greatest excellence, not as a possible but as an actual existence. This of itself was a valuable help to them, for centres of imagination were thus determined for them and given a certain external validity; whereas among the moderns art is felt to be in its essence a mode of subjective creation, having no reality except in thought. The resulting sense of uncertainty, the weakened faith in such emanations of man's brain, almost inevitable for the contemporary poet or artist, is one cause of the recoil of our imagination from the ideal, and of the attraction of realism for our writers, and perhaps of our content with a literature and art that will have fact for its province. "Let us have facts," is the cry; "of truth—that is, the relation of facts—who can be certain? Let us represent men as they are; of men as they ought to be who has any observation?" And even within these limits of the new school it is said, furthermore, that attention is to be paid to the individual; not to man as he is, but to this man, taken at random, as he is. The type is too general to be depicted, too far


text: 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hadleigh

title: 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hadleigh


text:
Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/104

94 from actual seeing, too much an abstraction of the mind. It is plain that at the root of the difficulty felt by the realists who theorize in this way lies the conviction that the further the literary or any other representative art gets from the special fact, trait, or passion in its particular manifestation, the more vague, doubtful, pale, rubbed-out,—in a word, the more generalized,—it becomes, and hence loses sharpness, vigor, and illusiveness. But with the Greek the case was clearly quite otherwise. There was no loss of individualization in the type, whether of physical or of spiritual perfection. This Theseus or that Hermes is ideal; both are generalized from men, but they suffer no loss of vitality thereby. The idealism of Athens did not fade out in abstraction, but embodied the permanent elements of harmonious beauty in body and spirit, in forms "more real than living man." The habit of thinking in images, or with fixed associations of images, with general notions, was one reason for this success, undoubtedly; but before concluding that the literary and rationalizing culture of our day forbids us to hope for a similar blending of the type with individuality, let us remember


text: 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hadley, Arthur Twining


text:
Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/105

Rh that as with Phidias, so with Shakespeare: Hamlet is at once the type and the man. The poet born cannot turn aside, on this hand, into science, as the realists do; nor on that hand, into philosophy, as the allegorists do. To him that ideal art alone is possible in which the two are united in the expression of permanent and universal truth through selected facts.

Nevertheless, it may be urged, the Greeks passed rapidly from the idealistic to the realistic stage. And in connection with this one observes the happiness with which Dr. Waldstein identifies the elements of likeness between the Greeks and the moderns, just as he opposes their differences to each other. The most admirable example is an inquiry into the æsthetical qualities of the Hermes of Praxiteles, and in the course of it he delineates the characteristics of the age of Praxiteles, and parallels them with the traits of the time just subsequent to the French Revolution. In doing this he incidentally describes the common spirit in Shelley, Musset, and other representatives of an art, not of the noblest, but not of the worst either, of the interval after the great age, yet before the marked decadence. It may


text:
Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/106

96 be said that the English never had an age of the Phidian kind; in European culture that is to be sought, if at all, in mediæval art. The Praxitelean age, however, was reproduced in essence in the first generation of our romantic period. A certain pathos, felt in view both of the world and of one's self, is perhaps its dominant quality, and with it go a sophistication, a self-consciousness, a reflectiveness, a slight yet not complete abstraction of the spirit from the object before it, illustrated by the expression of the head of Hermes in relation to the infant Dionysus on his arm. It is the mood of one whose spontaneous joy has been disturbed forever by thought. In such work one sees that the objective character of art, as it was in Phidias, is yielding to a new impulse; that the hold of the imagination on the divine and the eternal is slowly relaxing. At last, idealism went out in Greece, and, either in the shape of the portrait statues, or of such sculptures as those of Pergamon, realism came in to be the be-all and also the end-all of art.

Why was it, one asks, that the plastic nature of the Greeks did not preserve them, if the image-making faculty did in fact count


text:
Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/107

Rh so much in their development? How did they come to lose the ideal forms that sprang in the mind of Phidias when he thought of beauty and virtue? One cannot say that idealism failed, for its triumph in the Parthenon marbles marks the highest point ever reached by the human imagination in embodying its vision. It died out, and one says in explanation that the attention given to technique at last led to a disregard of the idea; or that the mere ability to reproduce details exactly was a temptation to apply art to deceptive imitation of the seen instead of to an illusive expression of the unseen; or that the age had lost the great ideas themselves, the perception of beauty and virtue, the belief in them and honor for them, and hence necessarily declined upon the things of this world,—that is, upon what is seen by the bodily eye rather than in the realm of thought and spiritual insight: and of these explanations perhaps one is as true as another, for they are all descriptions, from different standpoints, of what actually occurred. It is impossible, however, that in view of this history, and of the similar course in the development of mediæval painting, one should not ask


text:
Page:EB1911 - Volume 02.djvu/290

 author’s lifetime and perhaps by his own hand. Then many supplements were written, e.g. by Ferghānī (not extant) and by Hamadhānī (partly preserved in Paris). ʽArīb of Cordova made an abridgment, adding the history of the West and continuing the story to about 975. Ibn Mashkawaih wrote a history from the creation to 980, with the purpose of drawing the lessons of the story, following Ṭabarī closely, as far as his book is known, and seldom recurring to other sources before the reign of Moqtadir; what follows is his own composition and shows him to be a writer of talent. In 963 an abridgment of the Annals was translated into Persian by Balʽamī, who, however, interwove many fables. Ibn al-Athīr (d. 1234) abridged the whole work, usually with judgment, but sometimes too hastily. Though he sometimes glided lightly over difficulties, his work is of service in fixing the text of Ṭabarī. He also furnished a continuation to the year 1224. Later writers took Ṭabarī as their main authority, but sometimes consulted other sources, and so add to our knowledge—especially Ibn al-Jauzī (d. 1201), who adds many important details. These later historians had valuable help from the biographies of famous men and special histories of countries and cities, dynasties and princes, on which much labour was spent from the 4th century from the Flight onwards.

The chief historians after Ṭabarī may be briefly mentioned in chronological order. Rāzī (d. 932) wrote a History of Spain; Eutychius (d. 940) wrote Annals (ed. L. Cheikho, Paris, 1906), which are very important because he gives the Christian tradition; Sūlī (d. 946) wrote on the Abbasid caliphs, their viziers and court poets;  (q.v.) composed various historical and geographical works (d. 956). Of Ṭabarī’s contemporary Hamza Ispahānī (c. 940) we have the Annals (ed. Gottwaldt, St Petersburg, 1844); Ibn al-Qūṭīya wrote a History of Spain; Ibn Zūlāq (d. 997) a History of Egypt; ʽOtbi wrote the History of Mahmud of Ghazna, at whose court he lived (printed on the margin of the Egyptian edition of Ibn al-Athīr); Thaʽlabī (d. 1036) wrote a well-known History of the Old Prophets; Abu Nuʽaim al-Ispahānī (d. 1039) wrote a History of Ispahan, chiefly of the scholars of that city; Thaʽālibī (d. c. 1038) wrote, inter alia, a well-known History of the Poets of his Time, published at Damascus, 1887; (q.v.) (d. 1048) takes a high place among historians; Kodāʽī (d. 1062) wrote a Description of Egypt and also various historical pieces, of which some are extant; Ibn Sāʽid of Cordova (d. 1070) wrote a View of the History of the Various Nations. Bagdad and its learned men found an excellent historian in al-Khātib al-Baghdādī (d. 1071), and Spain in Ibn Hayān (d. 1076), and half a century later in Ibn Khaqān (d. 1135) and Ibn Bassām (d. 1147). Samʽani (d. 1167) wrote an excellent book on genealogies; ʽUmāra (d. 1175) wrote a History of Yemen (ed. H. C. Kay, London, 1892); Ibn ʽAsaqir (d. 1176) a History of Damascus and her Scholars, which is of great value, and exists in whole or in part in several libraries. The Biographical Dictionary of the Spaniard Ibn Pascual (d. 1182) and that of Dabbi, a somewhat junior contemporary, are edited in Codera’s ''Bibliotheca Arab. Hisp.'' (1883–1885); Saladin found his historian in the famous ʽImād uddīn (d. 1201) (Arabic text, ed. C. Landberg, Leiden, 1888). Ibn ul-Jauzī, who died in the same year, has been already mentioned. Abdulwahid’s History of the Almohades, written in 1224, was published by Dozy (2nd ed., 1881). Abdullatīf or Abdallatīf (d. 1232) is known by his writings about Egypt (trans. de Sacy, 1810); Ibn al-Athīr (d. 1233) wrote, in addition to the Chronicle already mentioned, a Biographical Dictionary of Contemporaries of the Prophet. Qiftī (d. 1248) is especially known by his History of Arabic Philologists. Sibt ibn al-Jauzi (d. 1256), grandson of the Ibn al-Jauzī already mentioned, wrote a great Chronicle, of which much the larger part still exists. Codera has edited (Madrid, 1886) Ibn al-ʽAbbar’s (d. 1260) Biographical Lexicon, already known by Dozy’s excerpts from it. Ibn al-ʽAdīm (d. 1262) is famed for his History of Aleppo, and Abu Shama (d. 1267) wrote a well-known History of Saladin and Nureddin, taking a great deal from ʽImad uddin. Ibn abī Usaibia (d. 1269) wrote a History of Physicians, ed. A. Müller. The History of Ibn al-ʽAmīd (d. 1276), better known as Elmacin, was printed by Erpenius in 1625. Ibn Saʽīd al-Maghribī (d. 1274 or 1286) is famous for his histories, but still more for his geographical writings. The noted theologian (q.v.; d. 1278) wrote a Biographical Dictionary of the Worthies of the First Ages of Islam. Pre-eminent as a biographer is (q.v.; d. 1282), whose much-used work was partly edited by de Slane and completely by Wüstenfeld (1835–1840), and translated into English by the former scholar (4 vols., 1843–1871).

Abu ʽl-Faraj, better known as Bar-Hebraeus (d. 1286), wrote, besides his Syriac Chronicle, an Arabic History of Dynasties (ed. E. Pocock, Oxford, 1663, Beirūt, 1890). Ibn ʽAdharī’s History of Africa and Spain has been published by Dozy (2 vols., Leiden, 1848–1851), and the Qartās of Ibn abī Zarʽ by Tornberg (1843). One of the best-known of Arab writers is (d. 1331) (q.v.). Not less famous is the great Encyclopaedia of his contemporary Nuwairī (d. 1332), but only extracts from it have been printed. Ibn Sayyid an-Nās (d. 1334) wrote a full biography of the Prophet; Mizzī (d. 1341) an extensive work on the men from whom traditions have been derived. We still possess, nearly complete, the great Chronicle of Dhahabī (d. 1347), a very learned biographer and historian. The geographical and historical Masālik al-Absār of Ibn Fadlallāh (d. 1348) is known at present by extracts given by Quatremère and Amari. Ibn al-Wardī (d. c. 1349), best known by his Cosmography, wrote a Chronicle which has been printed in Egypt. Ṣafadī (d. 1363) got a great name as a biographer. Yafiʽī (d. 1367) wrote a Chronicle of Islam and Lives of Saints. Subkī (d. 1369) published Lives of the Theologians of the Shāfi’ite School. Of Ibn Kathīr’s History the greatest part is extant. For the history of Spain and the Maghrib the writings of Ibn al-Khatīb (d. 1374) are of acknowledged value. Another history, of which we possess the greater part, is the large work of Ibn al-Furāt (d. 1404). Far superior to all these, however, is the famous (q.v.) (d. 1406). Of the historical works of the famous lexicographer (q.v.) (d. 1414) only a Life of the Prophet remains. Maqrizī (d. 1442) is the subject of a separate article; Ibn Hajar (d. 1448) is best known by his Biographical Dictionary of Contemporaries of the Prophet, published in the Bibliotheca Indica. Ibn ʽArabshāh (d. 1450) is known by his History of Timur (Leeuwarden, 1767). ʽAinī (d. 1451) wrote a General History, still extant. Abuʽl-Mahāsin ibn Taghrībirdī (d. 1469) wrote at length on the history of Egypt; the first two parts have been published by Juynboll and Matthes, Leiden, 1855–1861. Flügel has published Ibn Kotlubogha’s Biographies of the Hanifite Jurists. Ibn Shihna (d. 1485) wrote a History of Aleppo. Of Sakhāwī we possess a bibliographical work on the historians. The polymath (q.v.) (d. 1505) contributed a History of the Caliphs and many biographical pieces. Samhūdī’s History of Medina is known through the excerpts of Wüstenfeld (1861). Ibn Iyās (d. 1524) wrote a History of Egypt, and Diarbekri (d. 1559) a Life of Mahomet. To these names must be added (q.v.) and  (q.v.) (d. 1658). He made use of European sources, and with him Arabic historiography may be said to cease, though he had some unimportant successors.

A word must be said of the historical romances, the beginnings of which go back to the first centuries of Islam. The interest in all that concerned Mahomet and in the allusions of the Koran to old prophets and races led many professional narrators to choose these subjects. The increasing veneration paid to the Prophet and love for the marvellous soon gave rise to fables about his childhood, his visit to heaven, &c., which have found their way even into sober histories, just as many Jewish legends told by the converted Jew Kaʽb al-Aḥbār and by Wahb ibn Monabbih, and many fables about the old princes of Yemen told by ʽAbīd, are taken as genuine history (see, however, Masʽūdī, iv. 88 seq.). A fresh field for romantic legend was found in the history of the

title: Page:EB1911 - Volume 02.djvu/290


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/18

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/18


text:
Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/19

The big bright Moon hung high and round,

In a densely darkened sky;

The tall pines swayed, and mocked, and groaned;

Th e mountains grew s o high

That th e Man-in-the-Moon came out and said,

"Ho! Spooks, for a m e rry dance."

The winds blow hard, th e caverns roar,

While o'er th e earth they prance.

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/19


text: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/9

title: Page:The Goblins' Christmas.djvu/9


text:
Page:Hudibras - Volume 1 (Butler, Nash, Bohn; 1859).djvu/130

60
 * Last Colon came, bold man of war,

Destined to blows by fatal star; Right expert in command of horse, But cruel, and without remorse. That which of Centaur long ago Was said, and has been wrested to Some other knights, was true of this: He and his horse were of a piece. One spirit did inform them both, The self-same vigour, fury, wrath; Yet he was much the rougher part, And always had the harder heart, Altho' his horse had been of those That fed on man's flesh, as fame goes. Strange food for horse! and yet, alas! It may be true, for flesh is grass. Sturdy he was, and no less able Than Hercules to cleanse a stable; As great a drover, and as great A critic too, in hog or neat. He ripp'd the womb up of his mother, Dame Tellus, 'cause he wanted fother, And provender, wherewith to feed Himself and his less cruel steed. It was a question, whether he, Or's horse, were of a family More worshipful; till antiquaries, After they'd almost pored out their eyes,


text:
Cato's Letters/Letter 27

SIR, Sallust, or whoever else was the author of the two discourses to Caesar about settling the commonwealth, observes to that emperor, that those magistrates judge wildly, who would derive their own security from the corruption of the people; and therefore make them wicked men, to make them good subjects: Whereas, says he, "tis the interest of a virtuous prince to make his people virtuous; for, the debauched, having thrown off all restraint, are of all men the most ungovernable."

Pliny tells Trajan, that all his predecessors, except Nerva and one or two more, studied how to debauch their people, and how to banish all virtue, by introducing all vices; first, because they were delighted to see others like themselves; secondly, because the minds of the Romans being depraved by the taste and vices of slaves, they would bear with greater tameness the imperial yoke of servitude.

Thus did these governors and enemies of Rome destroy virtue, to set up power. Nor was such policy at all new or strange:

It was then, and always will be, the direct road to absolute monarchy, which is in its nature at everlasting enmity with all goodness and honesty. The Roman virtue and the Roman liberty expired together; tyranny and corruption came upon them almost hand in hand.

This shews the importance of an honest magistracy; nothing certainly is more threatening, or more to be apprehended, than a corrupt one. A knave in power is as much to be dreaded, as a fool with a firebrand in a magazine of powder: You have scarce a bare chance for not being blown up.

From the wicked and worthless men, who engrossed all the places at Rome in the latter days of the commonwealth, and from the monstrous prodigalities, infamous briberies, and endless corruptions, promoted by these men, the sudden thraldom of that glorious city might easily have been foreseen. It was scarce possible to be honest, and preferred. Atticus would never accept of any employment, though he was offered the highest. "This refusal," says Monsieur Bayle, "was doubtless owing to his virtue: There was no rising to offices then, but by means that were infamous; nor was there any such thing as executing these offices according to the rules of justice and the publick good, without being exposed to the resentment and violence of many and great wicked men. He therefore chose to be rather a virtuous private man, than an exalted and publick rogue.

"How charming is this example, but how rare! If all men were like Atticus, there would be no danger of a state of anarchy. But as to that we may be easy; for there will be always more rogues and rooks at hand to be devouring and monopolizing places, by all proper vile means, than there will be places to bestow."

Bayle goes on, and tells us of "a great traveller, who being rallied upon his rambling humour, answered, that he would cease travelling, as soon as ever he could find a country where power and credit were in the hands of honest men, and preferments went by merit. Nay then, says one who heard him, you will infallibly die travelling."

Corruption, bribery, and treachery, were such ways to power, as Atticus would not tread. Colonel Sidney says, that "a noble person in his time, who was a great enemy to bribery, was turned out from a considerable post, as a scandal to the court; for, said the principal minister, 'he will make no profit of his place; and by that means cast a scandal upon those that do.'"

And Alexander ab Alexandro tells a story of a very honest man, well skilled in the languages, who having long struggled with difficulties and poverty, while he trusted in vain to his honesty and learning, bethought himself of a contrary road; and therefore turning pimp and pathick, instantly he prospered, and got great riches, power, and places.

Aude aliquid brevibus gyaris & carcere dignum.

Cicero, who lived to see dismal days of ambition and corruption at Rome, was sensible that he could do little or no good with all his abilities and his honesty. "If I saw," says he in a letter to Lentulus, "if I saw the commonwealth held and governed by corrupt and desperate men, as has happened in my days and formerly, no motive or consideration should engage me in their interests; neither their bribes could move me, nor could dangers, which often sway the boldest men, terrify me; nor could any of their civilities, or any of their obligations, soften me."

Talking, in another place, of the Senate, then awed by power, or governed by avarice, he says, Aut assentiendum est nulla cum gravitate paucis aut frustra dissentiendum: That is, you must either basely vote with Crassus and Caesar, and one or two men more in power, or vote against them to no purpose. These great men did not seek power, nor use it, to do good to their country, which is the end of power; but to themselves, which is the abuse of power. Where government is degenerated into jobbing, it quickly runs into tyranny and dissolution: And he who in any country possesses himself of a great post for the sake of gainful jobs, as a certain great person once owned that he did, ought to finish his last job under a gallows.

It is natural and necessary for those that have corrupt ends, to make use of means that are corrupt, and to hate all men that are uncorrupt.

I would lay it down as a rule for all nations to consider and observe, that where bribery is practised, 'tis a thousand to one but mischief is intended; and the more bribery, the more mischief. When therefore the people, or their trustees, are bribed, they would do well to consider, that it is not, it cannot be, for their own sakes. Honest and open designs, which will bear light and examination, are hurt and discredited by base and dark expedients to bring them about: But, if you would persuade a man to be a rogue, it is natural that money should be your first argument; and therefore, whoever offers me a bribe, does tacitly acknowledge that he thinks me a knave.

Tacitus, taking notice of the woeful decline of virtue and liberty, towards the end of the Republick, says, that the greatest villainies were committed with impunity, and ruin was the price of honesty: Deterrima quaeque impune, ac multa honesta exitio fuere. And indeed, where corruption and publick crimes are not carefully opposed, and severely punished, neither liberty nor security can possibly subsist.

The immense briberies practised by Julius Caesar, were sure and terrible presages of Caesar's tyranny. It is amazing what mighty sums he gave away: Caius Curio alone, one of the tribunes, was bought into his interest, at no smaller a price than half a million of our money. Other magistrates too had their shares; and all were bribed, who would be bribed. We may easily conceive how he came by such sums; he got them as wickedly as he gave them away. Nor can I call him generous in this vast liberality; since he purchased the Roman empire with its own money, and gave away a part to get the whole.

Unjust and unfrugal ways of throwing away money, make wicked and violent means necessary to get money; and rapine naturally follows prodigality. They that waste publick money, seldom stop there, but go a wicked step farther; and having first drained the people, at last oppress them. Publick frauds are therefore very alarming, as they are very big with publick ruin. What shall we say then of other times, when publick schemes have been concerted to confound all property, to put common honesty out of countenance, and banish it from amongst men; and when an appetite for power was only an appetite for mischief? Dreadful sure was the prospect! And yet this was the state of Rome in those days; as will be seen further before this letter is ended.

Nor would it have been any advantage or security to Rome, though Caesar and his party had been less able men than in truth they were: Having debauched the people, he did more by corruption towards enslaving them, than he did by his parts, as great as they were. It is somewhere observed, that to do good requires some parts and pains; but any man may be a rogue. The world, says the proverb, little knows what silly fellows govern it. Even the difficulties of doing good proceed from the pravity of some men's nature, ever prone to do evil; and so strong is that pravity, that many men frequently slight great temptations to be honest, and embrace slight temptations to be knaves.

It is an observation, which every body is capable of making, that a good character lost is hardly, if ever, recovered. Now the reason of this is, not so much from the malevolence of the world (often too ready to calumniate) as from the inability of a knave to become honest: He is, as it were, doomed to be one: The bias of his spirit is crooked; and if ever he act honestly, it is for a roguish reason. I have known a man, who, having wilfully lost all credit, rejected as wilfully all opportunities to regain it, even when thrown into his lap. He could not help earning fresh detestation, with great labour; when he might have acquired the highest renown with the greatest ease. From hence may be seen how dangerous it is ever to trust a man who has once been a knave; and hence too may be learned, that from men who have done eminent mischief, whether publick or private, greater still is to be dreaded. Vice is a prolifick thing, and wickedness naturally begets wickedness.

Olearius, giving an account of Muscovy, observes, that "the Great Duke's court hath this in common with those of other princes, that vice takes place of virtue, and gets nearest the throne. Those who have the honour to be nearest his person, are withal more subtle, more deceitful, and more insolent, than the others that have not. They know very well how to make their advantages of the prince's favour, and look for the greatest respects and humblest submissions imaginable, from those who make their addresses to them; which the others render them, as much to avoid the mischief they might do to them, as for the good they expect from them."

This is the character of a court, where one is not much surprized nor troubled to find out tyranny and corruption in abundance: But one is at once amazed and affected with the mournful account Sallust gives us of the Romans in his time; the Romans, who had been so virtuous a people, so great and so free!

The same author says, that it would have lessened his concern, had he seen such great wickedness perpetrated by men of great qualities. But his grief had not this mitigation: For, says he, wretched creatures with little souls, whose whole genius lay in their tongue and whose utmost talent and ability was to prate glibly, exercised with insolence that power which they had acquired by chance, or by the sloth of others. Ac me quidem mediocris dolor angerct, si virtute partam victoriam more suo per servitium exercerent: Sed homines inertissimi quorum omnis vis virtusque in lingua sita est, forte, & alterius socordia, dominationem oblatam insolentes agitant. And for the Roman nobility of that time, he says, that, like stupid statues, their names and titles were their only ornament: Inertissimi nobiles, in quibus, sicut in statua praeter nomen, nibil est additamenti. Sallust. ad C. Caesarem, de repub. ordinand.

We see what a market these men made of power, and what a degree of degeneracy they introduced. The end of all was, the utter loss of liberty, and a settled tyranny.

G. I am, &c.

title: Cato's Letters/Letter 27


text:
Cato's Letters/Letter 28

TO CATO

Sir,

See what it is to be conspicuous! Your honesty, and the truths which you tell, have drawn upon you much envy, and many lies. You cannot be answered; therefore it is fit to abuse you. Had you kept groveling near the earth, in company with most other weekly writers, you might have lulled the town asleep as they do, with great safety to your person, and without any body's saying an unkind word of you: But you have galloped away so fast and so far before them, that it is no wonder the poor vermin, conscious of their own heaviness and want of speed, crawl after you and curse you. It is natural, human sight is offended with splendor: This is exemplified in a man looking at the sun; he makes all the while a world of wry mouths and distorted faces.

Consider yourself, Sir, as the sun to those authors, who behold you with agonies, while they behold you with admiration. Great minds alone are pleased with the excellencies of others, and vulgar souls provoked by them. The mob of writers is like the weaver’s mob; all levellers. This appears by their unmannerly and seditious speeches concerning you, their monarch. Strange instance of impudence and ingratitude! They live upon you, and scold at you. Your lot is the same with that of many other eminent authors; you feed vermin before you are dead.

Your slanderers, as they are below even contempt, so are they far below all notice: But it is worth considering who set them at work; from whom they receive the wages of prostitution; and what contradictory things the poor creatures are taught to say. Scarce a paper appeared for a considerable time together in which Cato's letters were not extolled; and those who did it endeavoured, to the best of their skill, to write after him: But finding that his labours made theirs useless, and that the recommending of publick spirit was too mighty a task for humble hirelings, they suddenly, and without ceremony, tack about, and, by calumniating Cato, make themselves liars: Such deference have they for their customers, and for themselves!

It is no wonder, therefore, that the same worthy, but waggish pens, represent him, with the same breath, as an abandoned atheist, and a bigoted Presbyterian; while others as plainly prove him a flaming Jacobite, and an arrant republican; that is, one who is high for monarchy, and one who is against all monarchy. I could shew you these pretty consistencies in one and the same paper.

Cato had described and shewed the horrid effects of publick confusion, and contended for punishing the authors of our own: Hence Cato is represented as an enemy to government and order, and a promoter of confusion.

Cato had bestowed real and unfeigned encomiums upon his Majesty, and done all justice to the abilities and honesty of his ministers: Hence Cato is charged with casting reproaches, and making sarcasms upon his Majesty and his ministry.

Cato has writ against Turkish, Asiatick, and all sorts of tyranny: Hence Cato is said to be a great incendiary, and an open enemy to our constitution.

Cato contends, that great traitors ought to be hanged: Hence Cato is traduced, as if he affronted the ministry.

Cato asserts, that the good of mankind is the end of government: Hence Cato is for destroying all government.

Cato lays down certain rules for farther establishing his Majesty's throne, and for ensuring to him for ever the minds of his people: Therefore Cato is a Jacobite.

Cato has shewn at large the blessings of a limited monarchy, especially of our own: Therefore Cato is a republican.

Cato has shewn the dreadfulness of popular insurrections and fury; the misery of civil wars, the uncertainty of their end: Therefore Cato stirs up the people to sedition and rebellion.

Cato laments, that great criminals are seldom brought to the gallows: Hence Cato is represented as one that deserves the gallows.

Cato, talking of Turkey, observes with warmth and concern, that the holy name of God was belied, and religion prostituted, to bind down wretchedness upon his creatures, and to protect the tyrant that does it: therefore Cato scurrilously reviles the Church of England.

Cato has shewn the destructive terms of arbitrary power, and how it had almost dispeopled the earth: In answer to this it is said, that Cato wears a dark wig.

Cato has complained, that this great nation has been

abused, cheated, and exhausted; its trade ruined; its credit destroyed; its manufactures discouraged, &c. and affirmed, that vengeance is due to those traitors who have done it; that none but traitors will protect traitors; that publick honesty and publick spirit ought to be encouraged, in opposition to publick corruption, bribery, and rapine; that there is regard to be had to the rights, privileges, and tempers of the people: That standing armies are dreadful things; that a military government is violent and bloody: That they are the blackest traitors, who would break the confidence between a prince and his subjects: That great men mind chiefly the getting of plumbs; and that honest measures are the best measures. To all which it is replied, that Cato is a whimsical unreasonable man, who talks and expects strange things; and, in fine, that he dreams odd dreams.

By such powerful arguments is Cato answered; by such pretty arts decried. He is really a great criminal; he asserts the rights and property of the people, and calls for justice upon those who would destroy them. He is surely a Jacobite, who would not let certain elevated sages do what they would, and get what they pleased. I would ask, whether the obliging, protecting, and avenging, the injured people, be likely ways to bring in the Pretender? Yet these are the ways which Cato contends for. Or, whether the deceiving, loading, and squeezing of the harmless people, be natural ways to make and keep them well affected? Yet these are the ways which Cato condemns and exposes.

Being detached from all parties, eminently guiltless of all personal views of his own, and going upon principles certainly true in themselves, certainly beneficent to human society; it is no wonder that he is read and approved by every intelligent man in England, except the guilty, their screens, hirelings, and adherents. What he writes, the people feel to be true: If men can be great knaves, in spite of opposition; how much greater would they be, if there were none? And if justice be opposed, openly, shamelessly, and violently opposed, in spite of her champions and defenders; she must certainly be destroyed, if she had none. It is a dismal reflexion, that justice must sometimes be sought for inch by inch, before it can be obtained, and at last is not half obtained; and that the higher and blacker the villainy is, the greater is the security. I hope that this will never be our case; but I could name many a country whose case it has been.

I am not surprized that certain tall traitors are very angry with Cato. "Good now hold your tongue," said a quack to his complaining patient, under agonies into which he had been cast by the doctor's infallible specifick: "Good now hold your tongue, and be easy; leave the matter to me, and the matter will go well": That is, lie still and die, and I will warrant you. Great grief and distress will have utterance, in spite of art or terror.

On Ascension Day, when the Doge of Venice weds the sea with a ring, the admiral, who conducts the bucentauro, or vessel in which that ceremony is performed, does a bold thing: He pawns his head to the Senate, to ensure them, against the danger and effects of tempests and storms.But the thing would still be bolder, if he had first wilfully raised a storm, or bored a hole in the vessel.

I appeal to the sense of the nation, daily uttered in their addresses to the Parliament for relief and vengeance; whether Cato's sentiments be not the same with theirs; I appeal to the sufferings, the heavy, melancholy sufferings of the people, whether either Cato or they speak thus without grounds.

The grounds are too visible, and their allegations too true. Hence the rage of guilt, which is more galled by truth, than innocence is hurt by lies: And hence I have heard it observed, concerning a set of worthies, that they do not care what falsehoods you publish concerning them, but will never forgive you if you meddle with facts.

For certain gentlemen to find fault with Cato's letters, is to avow their own shame. Why was there occasion given for those letters? Some other questions might be asked too, which would discover fresh blackness in these betrayers, were they not already all over black. Who is it that might have checked, and yet did not check, rampant rogues last summer? And from what motives proceeded such omission? Who is it that openly screens open guilt? Who is it that conceals the evidence of guilt? Who is it that brow- beats the pursuers of guilt? Who is it that throws obstacles in the Parliament's way? Who is it that lengthens out the process? Who is it that strives to defeat the enquiry?Who is it that makes malcontents, and then reproaches them for being so?

In vain they fall upon Cato, with lying reproaches, false pictures, and ugly names: Their conduct betrays them; by making him of every party, they shew him to be of none; as he has shewed himself to be of none. I thought it, however, not amiss, thus, once for all, to make his apology, and to shew what are his crimes, and who his enemies. His great guilt is, that he will not spare guilt; and the great objection to his writings is, that they cannot be answered. Let the reader judge whether I have misrepresented him or his foes, who are no other than the late directors, their friends and confederates.

As to the poor weekly journeymen of the press, whose principle is the ready penny, and who, for a morsel, defile paper, and blot reputations without hurting them, they deserve no resentment. It is their profession to do what they are bid, when they are paid for it. A church is not the less sacred, because curs frequently lift up their leg against it, and affront the wall: It is the nature of dogs. They therefore are and ought to be pitied and overlooked; the business of this letter to you being to expose the false and unjust censures of some, who bear a greater figure than such harmless weekly writers, without possessing more honesty.

The conjectures of these creatures about the person of Cato afford matter of mirth. They will needs know him, right or wrong. Let them guess on; whatever they guess, I will venture to pronounce them liars, though they should guess truly: Since without being able to do any thing more than guess, they yet go on to affirm; which no honest man would do without competent evidence. I am,

G Sir

your humble servant,

Portius

title: Cato's Letters/Letter 28


text:
The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Shipton, Mother

SHIPTON, shĭp'tȯn, Mother, an English prophetess about whose existence there seems to be no certainty, while there is no doubt that many of the sayings attributed to her were fabricated by others. According to S. Baker, who published Mother Shipton's pretended prophecies in 1797, she was born near Knaresborough, Yorkshire, in July 1488, and baptized as Ursula Southiel. She died, according to the same authority, at over 70 years of age, but it was not until 1641 that a pamphlet appeared containing some of her alleged predictions. In 1645 all her prophecies were considered as having been fulfilled. In 1862 a prediction was made, with Mother Shipton's name appended to it, that the world would come to an end in 1881. It caused some excitement among the ignorant.


text:
Page:Whymper - Scrambles amongst the Alps.djvu/280

234 filled in after photographs, and a series of panoramic sketches which he made from his different stations. The map so produced was an immense advance upon those already in existence, and it was the first which exhibited the great peaks in their proper positions.

This extraordinary piece of work revealed Mr. Reilly to me as a man of wonderful determination and perseverance. With very small hope that my proposal would be accepted, I invited him to take part in renewed attacks on the Matterhorn. He entered heartily into my plans, and met me with a counter-proposition, namely, that I should accompany him on some expeditions which he had projected in the chain of Mont Blanc. The unwritten contract took this form:—I will help you to carry out your desires, and you shall assist me to carry out mine. I eagerly closed with an arrangement in which all the advantages were upon my side.

At the time that Mr. Reilly was carrying on his survey, Captain Mieulet was executing another in continuation of the great map of France; for about one-half of the chain of Mont Blanc (including the whole of the Valley of Chamounix) had recently become French once more. Captain Mieulet was directed to survey up to his frontier only, and the sheet which was destined to include his work was to be engraved, of course, upon the scale of the rest of the map, viz., $$\scriptstyle \frac {1}{80000}$$ of nature. But upon representations being made at head-quarters that it would be of great advantage to extend the survey as far as Cormayeur, Captain Mieulet was directed to continue his observations into the south (or Italian) side of the chain. A special sheet on the scale of $$\scriptstyle \frac {1}{40000}$$ was promptly engraved from the materials he accumulated, and was published in 1865, by order of the late Minister of War, Marshal Randon. This sheet was admirably executed, but it included the central portion of the chain only, and a complete map was still wanting.

Mr. Reilly presented his MS. map to the English Alpine Club. It was resolved that it should be published; but before it passed


text:
Page:Whymper - Scrambles amongst the Alps.djvu/282

236 {|
 * colspan=6|
 * valign=bottom|Mètres
 * Eng. feet.
 * align=right|1.
 * colspan=6|Mont Blanc
 * 4810
 * align=right|15,781
 * align=right|2.
 * colspan=6|Grandes Jorasses
 * 4206
 * align=right|13,800
 * align=right|3.
 * Aiguille
 * colspan=5|Verte
 * 4127
 * align=right|13,540
 * align=right|4.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|de Bionnassay
 * 4061
 * align=right|13,324
 * align=right|5.
 * colspan=6|Les Droites
 * 4030
 * align=right|13,222
 * align=right|6.
 * Aiguille
 * colspan=5|du Géant
 * 4010
 * align=right|13,157
 * align=right|7.
 * align=center|"
 * de Trélatête,
 * No.
 * 1
 * rowspan=3 |
 * align=right|13,222
 * align=right|6.
 * Aiguille
 * colspan=5|du Géant
 * 4010
 * align=right|13,157
 * align=right|7.
 * align=center|"
 * de Trélatête,
 * No.
 * 1
 * rowspan=3 |
 * de Trélatête,
 * No.
 * 1
 * rowspan=3 |

 * 3932
 * align=right|12,900
 * align=center|"
 * align=center|"
 * align=center|"
 * 2
 * 3904
 * align=right|12,809
 * align=center|"
 * align=center|"
 * align=center|"
 * 3
 * 3896
 * align=right|12,782
 * align=right|8.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|d'Argentière
 * 3901
 * align=right|12,799
 * align=right|9.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|du Triolet
 * 3879
 * align=right|12,726
 * align=right|10.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|du Midi
 * 3843
 * align=right|12,608
 * align=right|11.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|du Glacier
 * 3834
 * align=right|12,579
 * align=right|12.
 * colspan=6|Mont Dolent
 * 3830
 * align=right|12,566
 * align=right|13.
 * Aiguille
 * colspan=5|du Chardonnet
 * 3823
 * align=right|12,543
 * align=right|14.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|du Dru
 * 3815
 * align=right|12,517
 * align=right|15.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|de Miage
 * 3680
 * align=right|12,074
 * align=right|16.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|du Plan
 * 3673
 * align=right|12,051
 * align=right|17.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|de Blatière
 * 3533
 * align=right|11,591
 * align=right|18.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|des Charmoz
 * 3442
 * align=right|11,293
 * }
 * 3815
 * align=right|12,517
 * align=right|15.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|de Miage
 * 3680
 * align=right|12,074
 * align=right|16.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|du Plan
 * 3673
 * align=right|12,051
 * align=right|17.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|de Blatière
 * 3533
 * align=right|11,591
 * align=right|18.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|des Charmoz
 * 3442
 * align=right|11,293
 * }
 * align=right|11,591
 * align=right|18.
 * align=center|"
 * colspan=5|des Charmoz
 * 3442
 * align=right|11,293
 * }
 * align=right|11,293
 * }

The frontier-line follows the main ridge. Very little of it can be seen from the Valley of Chamounix, and from the village itself two small strips only are visible (amounting to scarcely three miles in length), viz. from the summit of Mont Blanc to the Dôme du Goûter, and in the neighbourhood of the Col de Balme. All the rest is concealed by outlying ridges and by mountains of secondary importance.

Mont Blanc itself is bounded by the two glaciers of Miage, the glaciers de la Brenva and du Géant, the Val Veni and the Valley of Chamounix. A long ridge runs out towards the N.N.E. from the summit, through Mont Maudit, to the Aiguille du Midi. Another ridge proceeds towards the N.W., through the Bosse du Dromadaire to the Dome du Goûter; this then divides into two, of which one continues N.W. to the Aiguille du Goûter, the other


text:
Page:Whymper - Scrambles amongst the Alps.djvu/284

238 Dolent) look well from low elevations, and seem to possess a certain importance, they sink into their proper places directly one arrives at a considerable altitude.

The summit of the Aiguille Verte would have been one of the best stations out of all these mountains for the purposes of my friend. Its great height, and its isolated and commanding position, make it a most admirable point for viewing the intricacies of the chain; but he exercised a wise discretion in passing it by, and in selecting as our first excursion the passage of the Col de Triolet.

We slept under some big rocks on the Couvercle on the night of July 7, with the thermometer at 26°5 Faht., and at 4°30 on the 8th made a straight track to the north of the Jardin, and thence went in zigzags, to break the ascent, over the upper slopes of the Glacier de Talèfre towards the foot of the Aiguille de Triolet. Croz was still my guide, Reilly was accompanied by one of the Michel Payots of Chamounix, and Henri Charlet, of the same place, was our porter.

The way was over an undulating plain of glacier of moderate inclination until the corner leading to the Col, from whence a steep secondary glacier led down into the basin of the Talèfre. We experienced no difficulty in making the ascent of this secondary glacier with such ice-men as Croz and Payot, and at 7.50 arrived on the top of the so-called pass, at a height, according to Mieulet, of 12,162 feet, and 4530 above our camp on the Couvercle.

The descent was commenced by very steep, but firm, rocks, and then by a branch of the Glacier de Triolet. Schrundst were abundant; there were no less than five extending completely across the glacier, all of which had to be jumped. Not one was equal in dimensions to the extraordinary chasm on the Col de Pilatte, but


text:
Cato's Letters/Letter 29

SIR, I would willingly propagate and preserve the following Order of Council, as a monument of his Majesty's great zeal for virtue and religion. It is published in the Gazette of the 29th of April, in the following words:

"At the Court of St. James's, the 28th day of April, 1721

"Present,

"The King's Most Excellent Majesty in Council

"His Majesty having received information, which gives great reason to suspect, that there have lately been, and still are, in and about the cities of London and Westminster, certain scandalous clubs or societies of young persons, who meet together, and, in the most impious and blasphemous manner, insult the most sacred principles of our holy religion, affront Almighty God himself, and corrupt the minds and morals of one another; and being resolved to make use of all the authority committed to him by Almighty God, to punish such enormous offenders, and to crush such shocking impieties before they increase and draw down the vengeance of God upon this nation: His Majesty has thought fit to command the Lord Chancellor, and his Lordship is hereby required to call together his Majesty's Justices of the Peace of Middlesex and Westminster, and strictly to enjoin them in the most effectual manner, that they, and every of them, do make the most diligent and careful enquiry and search for the discovery of any thing of this and the like sort, tending in any wise to the corruption of the principles and manners of men; and to lay before his Lordship such discoveries as from time to time may be made, to the end that all proper methods may be taken for the utter suppression of all such detestable practices. His Lordship is further directed to urge them to the due execution of their office, in detecting and prosecuting, with vigour, all profaneness, immorality, and debauchery, as they value the blessing of Almighty God, as they regard the happiness of their country, which cannot subsist, if things sacred and virtuous are trampled upon, and as they tender his Majesty's favour, to which they cannot recommend themselves more effectually, than by shewing the utmost zeal upon so important an occasion; to which end his Lordship is to acquaint them, that as his Majesty for himself has nothing more at heart than to regard the honour of God, so impiously struck at, and is determined to shew all marks of displeasure and discouragement to any who may lie even under the suspicion of such practices; so he shall always account it the greatest and most substantial service they can do to his Majesty or his government, to exert themselves in discovering any who are guilty of such impieties, that they may be openly prosecuted, and punished with the utmost severity and most publick ignominy which the laws of the land can inflict.

"Edward Southwell"

To this it is added, in the same Gazette,

"That his Majesty has been pleased to give orders to the principal officers of his household, to make strict and diligent enquiry, whether any of his Majesty's servants are guilty of the horrid impieties mentioned in the Order of Council inserted above, and to make a report thereof to his Majesty."

These societies must certainly be as distracted as they are impious. I have indeed been in doubt till now, whether there really were any such; but I am in no doubt about the punishment which they deserve: I think that it ought to be the most severe that is due to such raving wickedness, which is such, as neither youth nor wine can excuse, nor indeed extenuate; and till they are further punished, I think that the darkest holes in Bedlam ought to be their portion. But outrageous and godless as they are, they do not merit more detestation and severity, than do those who inhumanly give out, that gentlemen, who abhor such clubs, are members of them: The authors of so dreadful a calumny are much worse than murderers; because they endeavour to take away from men something much dearer than life: They are therefore in the class with daemons, and earn such mighty vengeance as God only can inflict.

The above Order of Council is very just and religious, and of excellent use and example: So much zeal cannot stop at a club or two of pernicious though private sinners; but doubtless extends to other criminals more publick and considerable, and even more destructive. The greatest part of the wickedness done by those thoughtless young wretches, is done to themselves, and like to remain with them; there being little probability that they will ever make many proselytes to their astonishing frenzies: Whereas the other great criminals, for the sole sake of doing good to themselves, have undone almost every man in England, with England itself into the bargain. They set three nations to sale; and themselves fixing the price, were themselves the buyers: They purchased our happiness, and paid us in want and sorrow. Every good man is proof against the contagion of profaneness; but virtue and goodness stood us in no stead against our money-monsters, who, having robbed all honest men, made a jest of honesty itself. Can there be greater evils under the sun, than rampant plunderers, abandoned corruption, and devouring calamity? Or are there any other evils which these do not produce?

We therefore take it for granted, that "as his Majesty is determined to shew all marks of displeasure and discouragement to any who may even lie under the suspicion of such destructive practices; so he will always account it the most substantial service that we can do to him and his government, to exert ourselves in discovering any who are guilty of such unparalleled frauds, such national wickedness; that they may be openly prosecuted, and punished with the utmost severity, and most publick ignominy, that the legislature can inflict."

And, "as his Majesty has been pleased to give orders to the principal officers of his household, to make strict and diligent enquiry, whether any of his Majesty's servants are guilty of the horrid impieties mentioned in the Order of Council inserted above, and to make report thereof to his Majesty:"

So we may assure ourselves, that the same severe enquiry has been already made, whether any of those in trust under his Majesty, or about his person, have stained their hands, dishonoured their master, and provoked Almighty God, by promoting or embarking in any of the horrid and spreading mischiefs practised last year by the late South-Sea directors, and their confederates.

An enquiry into religion, and the private morals of men, is not inconsistent with an enquiry into civil and publick villainies; nor can the former ever prove a bone of contention to divert the latter, whatever the wicked and the guilty may hope, and the honest and distressed may apprehend. Fresh objects of horror and aversion cannot lessen our general detestation for those who ought to be beyond all others detested. While we pursue wolves and tigers, and the mightier beasts of prey, who, if they be not destroyed, will continue to destroy, we are not to be diverted by the scent of a fox or badger, though they may annoy a private neighbourhood, and dispeople hen-roosts.

Our publick virtue is the best and surest proof that we can give of our private piety: Piety and justice are inseparable; and prayers said ten times a day, will not atone for a murder or a robbery committed once a month: Appearances go for nothing, when facts contradict them. The readiest way therefore to shew that our hearts are pure, is to shew that our hands are clean, and that we will punish those that have foul ones.

Here is a test of our virtue and innocence!

Let us hang up publick rogues, as well as punish private blasphemers. The observance of religion, and the neglect of justice, are contradictions. Let any man ask himself, whether a nation is more hurt by a few giddy, unthinking, young wretches, talking madly in their drink; or by open, deliberate, and publick depredations committed by a junto of veteran knaves, who add to the injury, and to their own guilt, by a shew of gravity, and a canting pretence to religion? The late directors all pretended to be good Christians. I would ask one question more; namely, whether it had not been better for England, that the late directors, and their masters, had spent their nights and their days in the Hell Fire Club, than in contriving and executing execrable schemes to ruin England? Pray, which of the two is your greater enemy, he who robs you of all that you have, but neither curses nor swears at you; or he who only curses you or himself, and takes nothing from you?

Where justice is exactly observed, religion will be observed; and to pretend to be very strict about the latter, without minding the former, would be highly absurd and ridiculous. Virtue necessarily produces religion, and is itself religion; and profaneness and irreligion will ever and necessarily follow corruption, the prolifick parent of numberless mischiefs.

Private profaneness is not therefore half so terrible to human society, as publick roguery and publick robbery. The happiness of mankind is surely the cause of God; and whenever I hear of arrests and edicts made by popish and tyrannical foreign princes, in favour of religion; I consider them as so many mockeries of God, whose creatures they, at the same time, grind and destroy. As consistently might they pretend great zeal for observing religiously the sixth command, and yet murder by war and famine ten thousand of their subjects a week.

James Naylor was severely punished for blasphemy; is there any comparison, as to their effects, between the crime of James Naylor, and the crimes of the late directors, their seconds, and abettors? James Naylor (being himself deluded) misled a few ignorant people, whose error was their greatest crime: But our modern impostors, our South-Sea deceivers have actually and wilfully plundered their country of near thirty millions of money, and involved it in universal confusion and want.

It is therefore a sensible pleasure to us, to behold his Majesty and his ministry engaged with so much zeal in vindicating our property, as well as our religion. His Majesty, in particular, has condescended, with unparalleled, I am sure uncommon, goodness, to tell the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen, that he has no share in the late wicked management. This is a piece of royal grace, with which, I believe, never any subjects were blessed before. From hence we may draw a fresh assurance of his Majesty's alacrity and readiness to punish the execrable authors of that wicked management, who are also the greatest enemies to his crown and dignity.

"His Majesty being resolved to make use of all the authority committed to him by Almighty God, to punish such enormous offenders, and to crush such shocking impieties, before they increase and draw down the vengeance of God upon this nation:"

I say, his Majesty being thus zealous for religion and the nation, will never suffer the authors of the greatest evil, the highest villainy ever committed in this nation, to escape unpunished. Has ever a heavier judgment befallen our nation, than the last year's merciless rapine? And can there be greater enemies to God and man, than the authors of it? Monsters who were for plucking up all virtue and all property by the roots. Oh, that their success had not increased their guilt! They acted as if they did not believe that there was a God who judged the world, and as if they defied all human tribunals, as well as the divine. These are the atheists terrible to society; this is the atheism woefully and universally felt. Desolation and misery are the occupation and sport of devils, and they their vicegerents who promote them.

He who talks profanely of things sacred, is a wicked man, and as ill bred as he is wicked: But he who wantonly fills a country, a glorious and happy country, with want, woe, and sorrow; what name, what torture, what death, does he not deserve? He is a destroyer-general: He is a mad dog, with ten thousand mouths, who scatters poison, wounds, and death all around him.

I shall conclude in the strong words of the above Order of Council; namely, that as we value the blessing of Almighty God, as we regard the happiness of our country, which cannot subsist, if things sacred and virtuous (and such are private property, publick faith, and publick justice) are trampled upon; and as we tender his Majesty's favour, to which we cannot recommend ourselves more effectually, than by shewing the utmost zeal upon so important an occasion: I say, as we value all these, let us be warm, bold, and active in the discovery and punishment of such enormous offenders; and to crush such shocking mischiefs, before they increase and draw down the vengeance of God upon this nation.

G. I am, &c.

P.S. I, who hate to see the punishment of any sort of great wickedness linger, do here propose an expedient to come at a certainty about the blasphemous clubs: Let a reward be publickly offered for the discovery of any of their members, to be paid upon their legal conviction; and, in the mean time, let us not cast random reproaches upon particular men; lest, by falling upon the innocent, they return double upon ourselves. It is base and dishonest to feign crimes that are not; and where they really are, it is barbarous and diabolical to father them upon the guiltless: He who charges upon another a crime that deserves the gallows, does, if it prove false, pronounce sentence against himself, and proclaim his own right to Tyburn: As, on the other hand, he who screens from the gallows those that deserve it, adopts their title to the halter, and ought to swing in their room.

Can there be greater justice and impartiality than this? And I assure you, Sir, I heartily wish that they may take place.

title: Cato's Letters/Letter 29


text:
Page:Whymper - Scrambles amongst the Alps.djvu/286

240 soft, so pure; it seemed a crime to defile it; it was a miniature Jungfrau, a toy summit, you could cover it with the hand.

But there was nothing little about the view from the Mont Dolent. [ Situated at the junction of three mountain ridges, it rises in a positive steeple far above anything in its immediate neighbourhood; and certain gaps in the surrounding ridges, which seem contrived for that especial purpose, extend the view in almost every direction. The precipices which descend to the Glacier d'Argentiere I can only compare to those of the Jungfrau, and the ridges on both sides of that glacier, especially the steep rocks of Les Droites and Les Courtes, surmounted by the sharp snow-peak of the Aig. Verte, have almost the effect of the Grandes Jorasses. Then, framed, as it were, between the massive tower of the Aig. de Triolet and the more distant Jorasses, lies, without exception, the most delicately beautiful picture I have ever seen—the whole massif of Mont Blanc, raising its great head of snow far above the tangled series of flying buttresses which uphold the Monts Maudits, supported on the left by Mont Peuteret and by the mass of ragged aiguilles which overhang the Brenva. This aspect of Mont Blanc is not new, but from this point its pose is unrivalled, and it has all the superiority of a picture grouped by the hand of a master. . . . The view is as extensive, and far more lovely than that from Mont Blanc itself. ]

We went down to Cormayeur, and on the afternoon of July 10 started from that place to camp on Mont Sue, for the ascent of the Aiguille de Trélatête; hopeful that the mists which were hanging about would clear away. They did not, so we deposited ourselves, and a vast load of straw, on the moraine of the Miage Glacier, just above the Lac de Combal, in a charming little hole which some solitary shepherd had excavated beneath a great slab of rock. We spent the night there, and the whole of the next day, unwilling


text:
Cato's Letters/Letter 30

SIR, I send you another excellent letter of the great Brutus. They who say that I forged the last, make me as great a compliment as ever was made to man; since whoever could write that letter, is, without reflecting on my contemporaries, certainly the greatest man of the age.

To the former letter I gave you an historical introduction; I shall give you another to this, and own myself obliged for it to Monsieur Soreau.

Brutus and Cassius, after the death of Caesar, having left Rome, Octavius, Caesar's nephew, arrived there: He was no more than nineteen years old; and the first thing of note that happened to him, was a quarrel with Mark Anthony, who treated him like a child, with contempt, and indeed was grown insupportable to all the world. Cicero and Anthony being then declared enemies, Octavius was persuaded by his friends to throw himself into the arms of Cicero. Hence began their friendship, equally desirable to both: Cicero governed the Senate, and Octavius had the hearts of his uncle's soldiers, with great treasure to gain new friends, and carry on new designs. Mark Anthony was the common enemy of both, and of the Republick, which he as outrageously attacked, as Cicero warmly defended.

This quarrel gave occasion to those orations of Cicero, called philippicks; which are eternal monuments of his love for his country, as well as of the marvelous eloquence of that great man.

Cicero and Octavius succeeded; they got the better of Mark Anthony, and drove him out of Rome. But, by his interest and activity, he soon gathered such a force, as he thought sufficient to make himself master of Rome; which therefore he prepared to attack and possess by downright violence. But Octavius having levied, at his own expence, an army, composed mostly of the veteran troops of Caesar, opposed the march of Anthony, and diverted that dreadful storm from the city. Cicero, who had undertaken the defence of Octavius from his first arrival at Rome, and laboured to fortify his cause by the authority of the Senate, was not wanting to extol this first service of Octavius for the Republick. Hence extraordinary honours were decreed him; that he should be made propraetor, and in that quality commander of the army; that a recompence should be given to his troops; that he should be received into the number of the Senators; that he might, before he came of age, demand all the other greatest dignities of the commonwealth; and even that a statue should be erected to him.

In the mean time Anthony, thus repulsed by Octavius, marched into Cisalpine Gaul, to drive from thence Decimus Brutus, its governor, a kinsman of our Brutus, and one of the tyrannicides. That governor, being unprovided of forces sufficient to fight Anthony, retired into the city of Modena, a Roman colony; and there shutting himself up, expected succour from the Senate. Anthony in the interim laid siege to the place, in hopes that being once master of that city, he would soon be so of Gaul, and afterwards be enabled to return into Italy, with a power sufficient to conquer Rome, where he meant to erect a dominion as absolute as was that of Caesar.

That siege occasioned fresh meetings of the Senate; where, in fine, Mark Anthony was declared an enemy to the commonwealth; and both the consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, were sent with an army to relieve Decimus Brutus: With the consuls, Octavius was likewise sent.

During all these transactions, our Brutus and Cassius having staid some time in Italy, after their leaving Rome, were now retired to their governments, Brutus to Macedonia, and Cassius to Syria; and both were levying men, and forming armies, for the defence of the commonwealth.

As to Cicero, he was now in the zenith of power, and governed all things at Rome: He particularly presided in the Senate, as the most antient consular, during the absence of the two consuls. In this situation he was wonderfully curious to know what was the opinion of Brutus concerning himself and his administration. It is certain that Brutus had his highest esteem; and he thought that if he could procure the esteem of Brutus, it would be an eminent proof of his own virtue and merit, as well as the most glorious reward of that virtue and merit. Brutus had, in all his letters, been very silent with him upon this head. Cicero therefore makes use of Atticus, their common friend, to sift Brutus, and know his sentiments. As soon, therefore, as it was known at Rome, that the siege of Modena was raised, and Anthony defeated by the two consuls and Octavius, Atticus dispatched the news to Brutus, and in his letter sounded him about his thoughts of Cicero.

The following letter is a frank and open answer to that of Atticus. In it he justly condemns Cicero's over violent hatred to Mark Anthony, which betrayed him into as unreasonable an affection and deference for Octavius, his champion against Anthony. Cicero saw his error at last, but saw it too late; the power and credit to which he had raised Octavius, cost him his life, and Rome her liberty. Cicero, who was the author of all the greatness and authority of Octavius, was by Octavius given up to the rage and sword of Mark Anthony, against whom Octavius had been generously defended and supported by Cicero: And Octavius enslaved the commonwealth with those very arms, which the commonwealth had trusted with him for her protection. So early had the pious Augustus learned the arts and gratitude of an absolute monarch!

G. I am, &c.

BRUTUS TO ATTICUS

"You tell me, that Cicero wonders why, in any of my letters, I have never discovered to him my sentiments concerning his management and administration at Rome; I therefore discover those sentiments to you, since you are so earnest to know them.

"I know well the sincerity and great uprightness of Cicero's intentions: His passion for the good of the commonwealth is indeed evident and remarkable. But prudent and wise as he is, he has given proofs of a zeal which is imprudent, and a heart that is vain: I leave it to you to judge, which of these swayed him, when, more forward than well advised, he drew upon himself the hatred of so terrible a foe as Mark Anthony. This he meant for the good of the commonwealth; but it has had a contrary effect, since by it, instead of bridling, as he proposed, the dangerous power of Octavius, he has further animated his ambition, and raised his aims. Besides, such is the fatal complaisance of Cicero for that man, that he cannot help speaking of myself and the patriots of my country, with severe and bitter language; which, however, returns double upon himself: If we have put one man to death, he has put many. We killed Caesar, and he the associates of Catiline. If therefore Casca,who gave Caesar the first blow, be a murderer, as Cicero, to please Octavius, calls him; Cicero himself is one, and must confess himself one, and his great enemy Bestia is justified in calling him so.

"How! because we have not the Ides of March, in which we dispatched Caesar, eternally in our mouths, as Cicero has the Nones of December,in which he suppressed the conspiracy of Catiline, and which he is for ever celebrating upon all occasions; does he take advantage of our modesty and his own vanity, and find from hence more reason to blame a glorious deed done by us for mankind, than Clodiusand Bestia had to condemn, as they always did, his own severe conduct when he was consul?

"Cicero every where boasts, that he sustained the war against Anthony; yet no body ever saw Cicero out of a gown, and words were his weapons. But let it be so, that he has defeated Anthony; where is the victory, if, curing one mischief, it introduce a worse? And what avails it to have extinguished the tyranny of Anthony, if he who has done it erect another in its room more terrible, by being more durable? And yet thus will it be if we suffer it. These are articles in the conduct of Cicero, which shew that it is not the tyrant nor the tyranny that he fears; but it is only Anthony that he fears. If a man will have a tyrant, it is all one to me, whether he be more or less outrageous; it is the thing, it is the having a tyrant, which I dread.

"That Cicero is hastening to set up a tyrant, is plain, from actions as visible as sad. Octavius is all in all; a triumph is decreed him; his troops have largesses given them; he is loaded with flatteries, he is covered with honours. What shame for Cicero, to behold all this, and his own abject posture! His publick behaviour, and the speeches and motions which he makes in the Senate, all centering in his master; are they not a scandal to the great figure of that great consular, and a stain upon the renowned name of Cicero?

"You will read this with pain, as with pain I write it; but it is a task which you have put upon me. Besides, I know your thoughts of our publick affairs, and that desperate and extraordinary as they are, you think that, contrary to all appearance, they may be remedied by means that are ordinary. I do not however blame you, my dear Atticus; comfort yourself with hope; it is agreeable to your age, to the sweetness of your temper, and to your regard for your children: I do not therefore wonder that you are indolent and sanguine; which disposition of yours appears still farther to me, from the account which my friend Flaviusgave me of what passed between you and him.

"But to return to Cicero: Pray where is the difference between him and the servile Salvidenus?Could that base retainer to Octavius struggle for the glory of his master with more labour and zeal than does Cicero? You will say, perhaps, that Cicero dreads still the remains of the civil war. This is wild: Can any one dread a beaten enemy, and yet apprehend nothing from the formidable power of one who commands a great army, elevated by victory? nor from the rashness of a young man, who may conquer the commonwealth by the means which enabled him to conquer for it? Does Cicero therefore make this mighty court to Octavius, because, having given him so much, he thinks it dangerous not to give him all! Oh the wretched folly of cowardice! thus to lessen your own security by consulting it; and to increase tyranny because you fear it! Is it not better to have nothing at all to fear, than thus to compound for the degrees of fear?

"The truth is, we too much dread poverty, banishment, and death; and our imagination swells their terrors beyond bounds. There are greater evils than these; and Cicero is mistaken if he thinks that there are not. And yet all goes well with him, if he be but humoured, if his opinion be regarded, if his suits be granted; if he be courted and extolled: He has no quarrel to servitude, provided it be accompanied with honour and lustre; if there can be any such thing as honour and lustre in this lowest, this vilest lot of human nature.

"Octavius may indeed call him Father Cicero, refer every thing to his counsel, sooth him with praises, and shew great gratitude and fondness towards him, while he loses nothing by all this, which is only a fair outside and fine words. Facts speak the plainest truth, and they effectually contradict the above appearances. For, can there be a greater insult upon common-sense, than for Octavius to take for a father that man who is no longer in the number of freemen?

"Whither then tend all these compliances, all this zeal of Cicero for Octavius? Why, only to this; that Octavius may be propitious to Cicero. In this little, worthless, shameful point center all the actions and designs of the great Cicero! Hence it is that I value no longer, in the person of Cicero, those arts and accomplishments with which, doubtless, his soul is vastly replenished. What is he the better, himself, for so many excellent precepts, so many noble discourses, every where found in his works, concerning publick liberty, true and solid glory, the contempt of death, exile, and want? How much better does Philippusunderstand all those fine rules laid down by Cicero, than Cicero himself does, who pays more homage to Octavius than Philippus, who is father-in-law to Octavius, pays?

"Let Cicero therefore cease glorying thus vainly in our grief, which also ought to be his: For, to repeat what I have already said, what advantage can we draw from a victory, which only translates the pernicious power of Mark Anthony to a new usurper? And yet, by your letter, I perceive that it is still a doubt whether Mark Anthony be entirely defeated.

"After all, since Cicero can live a dependent and a slave, let him live a dependent and a slave. It ought not to be otherwise, if he can thus shamefully forget his reverend age, the illustrious honours which he has borne, and the memorable parts which he has performed.

"For myself, while I live, I will make war upon tyranny; that is, upon all exorbitant power that lifts men above the laws: Nor can any condition of servitude, however advantageous and alluring, divert me from this great, this worthy purpose: Nor could Anthony shake it, though he really were, what you say he is, a man of worth; a character which contradicts my constant opinion of him. The judgment and spirit of our ancestors are mine; they would not have their father for their tyrant, nor would I.

"All this openness to you is the result of my affection for you; nor could I have said so much, had I not loved you as well as Cicero thinks he is beloved by Octavius. That all these sad truths affect not you so much as they do me, is my concern; especially since to an eminent fondness for all your friends, you have added a particular fondness for Cicero. As to myself, I beg you to believe that my affection for him is still the same, though my esteem of him is greatly abated: Nor can I help it, it being impossible to judge ill or well of men and things, but according as they appear ill or well...."

title: Cato's Letters/Letter 30


text:
Page:Whymper - Scrambles amongst the Alps.djvu/288

242 very mysterious below. It was not until eventide she allowed us to approach her; then, as darkness came on, the curtains were withdrawn, the light drapery was lifted, and we stole up on tiptoe through the grand portal framed by Mont Sue. But night advanced rapidly, and we found ourselves left out in the cold, without a hole to creep into or shelter from overhanging rock. We might have fared badly, except for our good plaids. But when they were sewn together down their long edges, and one end tossed over our rope (which was passed round some rocks), and the other secured by stones, there was sufficient protection; and we slept on this exposed ridge, 9700 feet above the level of the sea, more soundly, perhaps, than if we had been lying on feather beds. We left our bivouac at 4.45 a.m., and at 9.40 arrived upon the