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READING MATERIAL SEM 1

Poetry I (Chaucer to Blake)
Sir Philip Sidney
Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 6

Some lovers speak, when they their Muses entertain,

Of hopes begot by fear, of wot not what desires,

Of force of heavenly beams, infusing hellish pain,

Of living deaths, dear wounds, fair storms and freezing fires.

Someone his song in Jove, and Jove’s strange tales, attires,

Broidered with bulls and swans, powdered with golden rain;

Another, humbler, wit to shepherd’s pipe retires,

Yet hiding royal blood full oft in rural vein.

To some a sweetest plaint a sweetest style affords,

While tears pour out his ink, and sighs breathe out his words,

His paper pale despair, and pain his pen doth move.

I can speak what I feel, and feel as much as they,

But think that all the map of my state I display,

When trembling voice brings forth that I do Stella love.

Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 72

Desire, though thou my old companion art,

And oft so clings to my pure Love that I

One from the other scarcely can descry,

While each doth blow the fire of my heart,

Now from thy fellowship I needs must part;

Venus is taught with Dian’s wings to fly;

I must no more in thy sweet passions lie;

Virtue’s gold now must head my Cupid’s dart.

Service and honor, wonder with delight,

Fear to offend, will worthy to appear,

Care shining in mine eyes, faith in my sprite:

These things are let me by my only dear;

But thou, Desire, because thou wouldst have all,

Now banished art. But yet alas how shall?

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William Shakespeare
Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

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John Donne
The Canonization

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,

Or chide my palsy, or my gout,

My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,

With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,

Take you a course, get you a place,

Observe his honor, or his grace,

Or the king's real, or his stampèd face

Contemplate; what you will, approve,

So you will let me love.

Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?

What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?

Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?

When did my colds a forward spring remove?

When did the heats which my veins fill

Add one more to the plaguy bill?

Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still

Litigious men, which quarrels move,

Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;

Call her one, me another fly,

We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,

And we in us find the eagle and the dove.

The phœnix riddle hath more wit

By us; we two being one, are it.

So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.

We die and rise the same, and prove

Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,

And if unfit for tombs and hearse

Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;

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And if no piece of chronicle we prove,

We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;

As well a well-wrought urn becomes

The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,

And by these hymns, all shall approve

Us canonized for Love.

And thus invoke us: "You, whom reverend love

Made one another's hermitage;

You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;

Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove

Into the glasses of your eyes

(So made such mirrors, and such spies,

That they did all to you epitomize)

Countries, towns, courts: beg from above

A pattern of your love!"

The Good-Morrow

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.

If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,

Which watch not one another out of fear;

For love, all love of other sights controls,

And makes one little room an everywhere.

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,

Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

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And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;

Where can we find two better hemispheres,

Without sharp north, without declining west?

Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;

If our two loves be one, or, thou and I

Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

Andrew Marvell
To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side

Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found;

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

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My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long-preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust;

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Thomas Gray
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r

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The moping owl does to the moon complain

Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r,

Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,

Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,

Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,

The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed,

The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,

No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,

Or busy housewife ply her evening care:

No children run to lisp their sire's return,

Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;

How jocund did they drive their team afield!

How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;

Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile

The short and simple annals of the poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,

Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,

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If Mem'ry o'er their tomb no trophies raise,

Where thro' the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault

The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn or animated bust

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,

Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;

Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,

Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page

Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;

Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,

And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood;

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,

Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

Th' applause of list'ning senates to command,

The threats of pain and ruin to despise,

To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,

And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes,

Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib'd alone

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Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin'd;

Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,

And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,

To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,

Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride

With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,

Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;

Along the cool sequester'd vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Yet ev'n these bones from insult to protect,

Some frail memorial still erected nigh,

With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,

Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd muse,

The place of fame and elegy supply:

And many a holy text around she strews,

That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,

This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd,

Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,

Nor cast one longing, ling'ring look behind?

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,

Some pious drops the closing eye requires;

Ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,

Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires.

For thee, who mindful of th' unhonour'd Dead

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Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;

If chance, by lonely contemplation led,

Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,

"Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn

Brushing with hasty steps the dews away

To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.

"There at the foot of yonder nodding beech

That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,

His listless length at noontide would he stretch,

And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

"Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,

Mutt'ring his wayward fancies he would rove,

Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,

Or craz'd with care, or cross'd in hopeless love.

"One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill,

Along the heath and near his fav'rite tree;

Another came; nor yet beside the rill,

Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

"The next with dirges due in sad array

Slow thro' the church-way path we saw him borne.

Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay,

Grav'd on the stone beneath yon aged thorn."

THE EPITAPH

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth

A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.

Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth,

And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.

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Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,

Heav'n did a recompense as largely send:

He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear,

He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend.

No farther seek his merits to disclose,

Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,

(There they alike in trembling hope repose)

The bosom of his Father and his God.

William Blake
The Tyger

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp,

Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

And water'd heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

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Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

The Lamb

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Gave thee life & bid thee feed.

By the stream & o'er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing wooly bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,

Making all the vales rejoice!

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,

Little Lamb I'll tell thee!

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb:

He is meek & he is mild,

He became a little child:

I a child & thou a lamb,

We are called by his name.

Little Lamb God bless thee.

Little Lamb God bless thee.

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Prose 1
Francis Bacon
“Of Truth”

WHAT is truth? said jesting Pilate,and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be, that delight in giddiness, and
count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting. And though the sects of
philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits, which are of the same veins, though there be
not so much blood in them, as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labor, which men take in
finding out of truth, nor again, that when it is found, it imposeth upon men’s thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a
natural, though corrupt love, of the lie itself. One of the later school of the Grecians, examineth the matter, and is at a
stand, to think what should be in it, that men should love lies; where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets, nor for
advantage, as with the merchant; but for the lie’s sake. But I cannot tell; this same truth, is a naked, and open day-light,
that doth not show the masks, and mummeries, and triumphs, of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights.
Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond, or
carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there
were taken out of men’s minds, vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like,
but it would leave the minds, of a number of men, poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and
unpleasing to themselves?

One of the fathers, in great severity, called poesy vinum daemonum, because it fireth the imagination; and yet, it is but
with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth in it,
that doth the hurt; such as we spake of before. But howsoever these things are thus in men’s depraved judgments, and
affections, yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or wooing
of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the
sovereign good of human nature. The first creature of God, in the works of the days, was the light of the sense; the last,
was the light of reason; and his sabbath work ever since, is the illumination of his Spirit. First he breathed light, upon the
face of the matter or chaos; then he breathed light, into the face of man; and still he breatheth and inspireth light, into the
face of his chosen. The poet, that beautified the sect, that was otherwise inferior to the rest, saith yet excellently well: It is
a pleasure, to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea; a pleasure, to stand in the window of a castle,
and to see a battle, and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage
ground of truth (a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene), and to see the errors, and
wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below; so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling,
or pride. Certainly, it is heaven upon earth, to have a man’s mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the
poles of truth.

To pass from theological, and philosophical truth, to the truth of civil business; it will be acknowledged, even by those
that practise it not, that clear, and round dealing, is the honor of man’s nature; and that mixture of falsehoods, is like alloy
in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it. For these winding, and crooked
courses, are the goings of the serpent; which goeth basely upon the belly, and not upon the feet. There is no vice, that
doth so cover a man with shame, as to be found false and perfidious. And therefore Montaigne saith prettily, when he
inquired the reason, why the word of the lie should be such a disgrace, and such an odious charge? Saith he, If it be well
weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards men. For a lie
faces God, and shrinks from man. Surely the wickedness of falsehood, and breach of faith, cannot possibly be so highly
expressed, as in that it shall be the last peal, to call the judgments of God upon the generations of men; it being foretold,
that when Christ cometh, he shall not find faith upon the earth.

“Of Death”

MEN fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children, is increased with tales, so is the
other. Certainly, the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin, and passage to another world, is holy and religious; but
the fear of it, as a tribute due unto nature, is weak. Yet in religious meditations, there is sometimes mixture of vanity, and
of superstition. You shall read, in some of the friars’ books of mortification, that a man should think with himself, what
the pain is, if he have but his finger’s end pressed, or tortured, and thereby imagine, what the pains of death are, when the
whole body is corrupted, and dissolved; when many times death passeth, with less pain than the torture of a limb; for the
most vital parts, are not the quickest of sense. And by him that spake only as a philosopher, and natural man, it was well
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said, Pompa mortis magis terret, quam mors ipsa. Groans, and convulsions, and a discolored face, and friends weeping,
and blacks, and obsequies, and the like, show death terrible. It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the
mind of man, so weak, but it mates, and masters, the fear of death; and therefore, death is no such terrible enemy, when a
man hath so many attendants about him, that can win the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it;
honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it; fear preoccupateth it; nay, we read, after Otho the emperor had slain himself, pity
(which is the tenderest of affections) provoked many to die, out of mere compassion to their sovereign, and as the truest
sort of followers. Nay, Seneca adds niceness and satiety: Cogita quamdiu eadem feceris; mori velle, non tantum fortis aut
miser, sed etiam fastidiosus potest. A man would die, though he were neither valiant, nor miserable, only upon a
weariness to do the same thing so oft, over and over. It is no less worthy, to observe, how little alteration in good spirits,
the approaches of death make; for they appear to be the same men, till the last instant. Augustus Caesar died in a
compliment; Livia, conjugii nostri memor, vive et vale. Tiberius in dissimulation; as Tacitus saith of him, Jam Tiberium
vires et corpus, non dissimulatio, deserebant. Vespasian in a jest, sitting upon the stool; Ut puto deus fio. Galba with a
sentence; Feri, si ex re sit populi Romani; holding forth his neck. Septimius Severus in despatch; Adeste si quid mihi
restat agendum. And the like. Certainly the Stoics bestowed too much cost upon death, and by their great preparations,
made it appear more fearful. Better saith he, qui finem vitae extremum inter munera ponat naturae. It is as natural to die,
as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful, as the other. He that dies in an earnest pursuit, is like
one that is wounded in hot blood; who, for the time, scarce feels the hurt; and therefore a mind fixed, and bent upon
somewhat that is good, doth avert the dolors of death. But, above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is’, Nunc dimittis;
when a man hath obtained worthy ends, and expectations. Death hath this also; that it openeth the gate to good fame, and
extinguisheth envy. - Extinctus amabitur idem.

“Of Adversity”

IT WAS an high speech of Seneca (after the manner of the Stoics), that the good things, which belong to prosperity, are
to be wished; but the good things, that belong to adversity, are to be admired. Bona rerum secundarum optabilia;
adversarum mirabilia. Certainly if miracles be the command over nature, they appear most in adversity. It is yet a higher
speech of his, than the other (much too high for a heathen), It is true greatness, to have in one the frailty of a man, and the
security of a God. Vere magnum habere fragilitatem hominis, securitatem Dei. This would have done better in poesy,
where transcendences are more allowed. And the poets indeed have been busy with it; for it is in effect the thing, which
figured in that strange fiction of the ancient poets, which seemeth not to be without mystery; nay, and to have some
approach to the state of a Christian; that Hercules, when he went to unbind Prometheus (by whom human nature is
represented), sailed the length of the great ocean, in an earthen pot or pitcher; lively describing Christian resolution, that
saileth in the frail bark of the flesh, through the waves of the world. But to speak in a mean. The virtue of prosperity, is
temperance; the virtue of adversity, is fortitude; which in morals is the more heroical virtue. Prosperity is the blessing of
the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New; which carrieth the greater benediction, and the clearer revelation
of God’s favor. Yet even in the Old Testament, if you listen to David’s harp, you shall hear as many hearse-like airs as
carols; and the pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job, than the felicities of
Solomon. Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes. We see in
needle-works and embroideries, it is more pleasing to have a lively work, upon a sad and solemn ground, than to have a
dark and melancholy work, upon a lightsome ground: judge therefore of the pleasure of the heart, by the pleasure of the
eye. Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed: for prosperity doth best
discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.

“Of Great Place”

MEN in great place are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state; servants of fame; and servants of business. So
as they have no freedom; neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times. It is a strange desire, to seek
power and to lose liberty: or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self. The rising unto place is
laborious; and by pains, men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base; and by indignities, men come to dignities.
The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing. Cum non
sis qui fueris, non esse cur velis vivere. Nay, retire men cannot when they would, neither will they, when it were reason;
but are impatient of privateness, even in age and sickness, which require the shadow; like old townsmen, that will be still
sitting at their street door, though thereby they offer age to scom. Certainly great persons had need to borrow other men’s
opinions, to think themselves happy; for if they judge by their own feeling, they cannot find it; but if they think with
themselves, what other men think of them, and that other men would fain be, as they are, then they are happy, as it were,
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by report; when perhaps they find the contrary within. For they are the first, that find their own griefs, though they be the
last, that find their own faults. Certainly men in great fortunes are strangers to themselves, and while they are in the
puzzle of business, they have no time to tend their health, either of body or mind. Illi mors gravis incubat, qui notus nimis
omnibus, ignotus moritur sibi. In place, there is license to do good, and evil; whereof the latter is a curse: for in evil, the
best condition is not to win; the second, not to can. But power to do good, is the true and lawful end of aspiring. For good
thoughts (though God accept them) yet, towards men, are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act; and
that cannot be, without power and place, as the vantage, and commanding ground. Merit and good works, is the end of
man’s motion; and conscience of the same is the accomplishment of man’s rest. For if a man can be partaker of God’s
theatre, he shall likewise be partaker of God’s rest. Et conversus Deus, ut aspiceret opera quae fecerunt manus suae, vidit
quod omnia essent bona nimis; and then the sabbath. In the discharge of thy place, set before thee the best examples; for
imitation is a globe of precepts. And after a time, set before thee thine own example; and examine thyself strictly,
whether thou didst not best at first. Neglect not also the examples, of those that have carried themselves ill, in the same
place; not to set off thyself, by taxing their memory, but to direct thyself, what to avoid. Reform therefore, without
bravery, or scandal of former times and persons; but yet set it down to thyself, as well to create good precedents, as to
follow them. Reduce things to the first institution, and observe wherein, and how, they have degenerate; but yet ask
counsel of both times; of the ancient time, what is best; and of the latter time, what is fittest. Seek to make thy course
regular, that men may know beforehand, what they may expect; but be not too positive and peremptory; and express
thyself well, when thou digressest from thy rule. Preserve the right of thy place; but stir not questions of jurisdiction; and
rather assume thy right, in silence and de facto, than voice it with claims, and challenges. Preserve likewise the rights of
inferior places; and think it more honor, to direct in chief, than to be busy in all. Embrace and invite helps, and advices,
touching the execution of thy place; and do not drive away such, as bring thee information, as meddlers; but accept of
them in good part. The vices of authority are chiefly four: delays, corruption, roughness, and facility. For delays: give
easy access; keep times appointed; go through with that which is in hand, and interlace not business, but of necessity. For
corruption: do not only bind thine own hands, or thy servants’ hands, from taking, but bind the hands of suitors also, from
offering. For integrity used doth the one; but integrity professed, and with a manifest detestation of bribery, doth the
other. And avoid not only the fault, but the suspicion. Whosoever is found variable, and changeth manifestly without
manifest cause, giveth suspicion of corruption. Therefore always, when thou changest thine opinion or course, profess it
plainly, and declare it, together with the reasons that move thee to change; and do not think to steal it. A servant or a
favorite, if he be inward, and no other apparent cause of esteem, is commonly thought, but a by-way to close corruption.
For roughness: it is a needless cause of discontent: severity breedeth fear, but roughness breedeth hate. Even reproofs
from authority, ought to be grave, and not taunting. As for facility: it is worse than bribery. For bribes come but now and
then; but if importunity, or idle respects, lead a man, he shall never be without. As Solomon saith, To respect persons is
not good; for such a man will transgress for a piece of bread. It is most true, that was anciently spoken, A place showeth
the man. And it showeth some to the better, and some to the worse. Omnium consensu capax imperii, nisi imperasset,
saith Tacitus of Galba; but of Vespasian he saith, Solus imperantium, Vespasianus mutatus in melius; though the one was
meant of sufficiency, the other of manners, and affection. It is an assured sign of a worthy and generous spirit, whom
honor amends. For honor is, or should be, the place of virtue; and as in nature, things move violently to their place, and
calmly in their place, so virtue in ambition is violent, in authority settled and calm. All rising to great place is by a
winding star; and if there be factions, it is good to side a man’s self, whilst he is in the rising, and to balance himself
when he is placed. Use the memory of thy predecessor, fairly and tenderly; for if thou dost not, it is a debt will sure be
paid when thou art gone. If thou have colleagues, respect them, and rather call them, when they look not for it, than
exclude them , when they have reason to look to be called. Be not too sensible, or too remembering, of thy place in
conversation, and private answers to suitors; but let it rather be said, When he sits in place, he is another man.

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

Joseph Addison

The Spectator’s Account of Himself

Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem

Cogitat, ut speciosa dehinc miracula promat.. — Horace

He does not lavish at a blaze his fire,

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Sudden to glare, and in a smoke expire;

But rises from a cloud of smoke to light,

And pours his specious miracles to sight — Francis

I HAVE observed, that a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure, till he knows whether the writer of it be a black
[dark] or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, with other particulars of the like nature, that
conduce very much to the right understanding of an author. To gratify this curiosity, which is so natural to a reader, I
design this paper and my next as prefatory discourses to my following writings, and shall give some account in them of
the several persons that are engaged in this work. As the chief trouble of compiling, digesting, and correcting will fall to
my share, I must do myself the justice to open the work with my own history.

I was born to a small hereditary estate, which, according to the tradition of the village where it lies, was bounded by the
same hedges and ditches in William the Conqueror's time that it is at present, and has been delivered down from father to
son whole and entire, without the loss or acquisition of a single field or meadow, during the space of six hundred years.
There runs a story in the family, that when my mother was gone with child of me about. three months she dreamt that she
was brought to bed of a judge whether this might proceed from a law-suit which was then depending in the family, or my
father's being a justice of the peace, I cannot determine; for I am not so vain as to think it presaged any dignity that I
should arrive at in my future life, though that was the interpretation which the neighbourhood put upon it.

The gravity of my behaviour at my very first appearance in the world, and all the time that I sucked, seemed to favour my
mother's dream: for, as she has often told me, I threw away my rattle before I was two months old, and would not make
use of my coral till they had taken away the bells from it.

As for the rest of my infancy, there being nothing in it remarkable, I shall pass it over in silence. I find, that during my
non-age, I had the reputation of a very sullen youth, but was always a favourite of my school-master, who used to say,
that my parts were solid, and would wear well. I had not been long at the university, before I distinguished myself by a
most profound silence; for during the space of eight years, excepting in the public exercises of the college, I scarce
uttered the quantity of an hundred words; and indeed do not remember that I ever spoke three sentences together in my
whole life. Whilst I was in this learned body, I applied myself with so much diligence to my studies, that there are very
few celebrated books, either in the learned or modern tongues, which I am not acquainted with.

Upon the death of my father, I was resolved to travel into foreign countries, and therefore left the university with the
character of an odd, unaccountable fellow, that had a great deal of learning, if I would but show it. An insatiable thirst
after knowledge carried me into all the countries of Europe in which there was anything new or strange to he seen: nay,
to such a degree was my curiosity raised, that having read the controversies of some great men concerning the antiquities
of Egypt, I made a voyage to Grand Cairo, on purpose to take the measure of a pyramid; and as soon as I had set myself
right in that particular, returned to my native country with great satisfaction.

I have passed my latter years in this city, where I am frequently seen in most public places, though there are not above
half a dozen of my select friends that know me; of whom my next paper shall give a more particular account. There is no
place of general resort, wherein I do not often make my appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my head into a round
of politicians at Will's, and listening with great attention to the narratives that are made in those little circular audiences.
Sometimes I smoke a pipe at Child's, and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the Postman [a newspaper], overhear the
conversation of every table in the room. I appear on Sunday nights at St. James's Coffee-house, and sometimes join the
little committee of politics in the inner room, as one who comes there to hear and improve. My face is likewise very well
known at the Grecian, the Cocoa-Tree, and in the theatres both of Drury Lane and the haymarket. I have been taken for a
merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten years, and sometimes pass for a Jew in the assembly of stock-jobbers at
Jonathan's: in short, wherever I see a cluster of people, I always mix with them, though I never open my lips but in my
own club.

Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind than as one of the species; by which means I have made myself
a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part in life. I am very
well versed in the theory of a husband or a father, and can discern the errors in the economy, business, and diversion of
others, better than those who are engaged in them; as standers-by discover plots, which are apt to escape those who are in
the game. I never espoused any part with violence, and am resolved to observe an exact neutrality between the Whigs and
Tories, unless I shall be forced to declare myself by the hostilities of either side. In short I have acted in all the parts of
my life as a looker-on, which is the character I intend to preserve in this paper.
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I have given the reader just so much of my history and character, as to let him see I am not altogether unqualified for the
business I have undertaken. As for other particulars in my life and adventures, I shall insert them in following papers, as I
shall see occasion. In the mean time, when I consider how much I have seen, read, and heard, I begin to blame my own
taciturnity; and since I have neither time nor inclination to communicate the fullness of my heart in speech, I am resolved
to do it in writing, and to print myself out, if possible, before I die. I have been often told by my friends, that it is pity so
many useful discoveries which I have made should be in the possession of a silent man. For this reason, therefore, I shall
publish a sheet-full of thoughts every morning, for the benefit of my contemporaries; and if I can any way contribute to
the diversion or improvement of the country in which I live, I shall leave it, when I am summoned out of it, with the
secret satisfaction of thinking that I have not lived in vain.

There are three very material points which I have not spoken to in this paper; and which, for several important reasons, I
must keep to myself, at least for some time: I mean an account of my name, my age, and my lodgings. I must confess, I
would gratify my reader in anything that is reasonable; but as for these three particulars, though I am sensible they might
tend very much to the embellishment of my paper, I cannot yet come to a resolution of communicating them to the
public. They would indeed draw me out of that obscurity which I have enjoyed for many years, and expose me in public
places to several salutes and civilities, which have been always very disagreeable to me; for the greatest pain I can suffer
is the being talked to, and being stared at. It is for this reason likewise, that I keep my complexion and dress as very great
secrets; though it is not impossible, but I may make discoveries of both in the progress of the work I have undertaken.
After having been thus particular upon myself, I shall in to-morrow's paper give an account of those gentlemen who are
concerned with me in this work; for, as I have before intimated, a plan of it is laid and concerted (as all other natters of
importance are) in a club. However, as my friends have engaged me to stand in the front, those who have a mind to
correspond with me, may direct their letters to the SPECTATOR, at Mr. Buckley's, in Little Britain. For I must further
acquaint the reader, that though our club meets only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we have appointed a Committee to sit
every night, for the inspection of all such papers as may contribute to the advancement of the public weal.

Joseph Addison

Sir Roger at the Theatre

Respicere exemplar vitae morumque jubebo

Doctum imitatorem, et vivas hinc ducere voces.

Hor.

My friend Sir Roger de Coverley, when we last met together at the club, told me that he had a great mind to see the new
tragedy with me, assuring me at the same time that he had not been at a play these twenty years. "The last I saw," said Sir
Roger, "was the Committee, which I should not have gone to, neither, had not I been told beforehand that it was a good
Church of England comedy." He then proceeded to inquire of me who this distressed mother was; and upon hearing that
she was Hector's widow, he told me that her husband was a brave man, and that when he was a schoolboy he had read his
life at the end of the dictionary. My friend asked me, in the next place, if there would not be some danger in coming
home late, in case the Mohocks should be abroad. "I assure you," says he, "I thought I had fallen into their hands last
night, for I observed two or three lusty black men that followed me half way up Fleet Street, and mended their pace
behind me in proportion as I put on to get away from them. You must know," continued the knight, with a smile, "I
fancied they had a mind to hunt me, for I remember an honest gentleman in my neighbourhood who was served such a
trick in King Charles the Second's time; for which reason he has not ventured himself in town ever since. I might have
shown them very good sport had this been their design; for, as I am an old fox-hunter, I should have turned and dodged,
and have played them a thousand tricks they had never seen in their lives before." Sir Roger added that if these gentlemen
had any such intention they did not succeed very well in it; "for I threw them out," says he, "at the end of Norfolk Street,
where I doubled the corner and got shelter in my lodgings before they could imagine what was become of me. However,"
says the knight, "if Captain Sentry will make one with us to-morrow night, and if you will both of you call upon me
about four o'clock, that we may be at the house before it is full, I will have my own coach in readiness to attend you, for
John tells me he has got the fore wheels mended."

The captain, who did not fail to meet me there at the appointed hour, bid Sir Roger fear nothing, for that he had put on
the same sword which he made use of at the battle of Steenkirk. Sir Roger's servants, and among the rest my old friend
the butler, had, I found, provided themselves with good oaken plants to attend their master upon this occasion. When he
had placed him in his coach, with myself at his left hand, the captain before him, and his butler at the head of his footmen
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in the rear, we convoyed him in safety to the playhouse, where, after having marched up the entry in good order, the
captain and I went in with him, and seated him betwixt us in the pit. As soon as the house was full and the candles
lighted, my old friend stood up and looked about him with that pleasure which a mind seasoned with humanity naturally
feels in itself at the sight of a multitude of people who seem pleased with one another, and partake of the same common
entertainment. I could not but fancy to myself, as the old man stood up in the middle of the pit, that he made a very
proper centre to a tragic audience. Upon the entering of Pyrrhus, the knight told me that he did not believe the King of
France himself had a better strut. I was, indeed, very attentive to my old friend's remarks, because I looked upon them as
a piece of natural criticism; and was well pleased to hear him, at the conclusion of almost every scene, telling me that he
could not imagine how the play would end. One while he appeared much concerned for Andromache, and a little while
after as much for Hermione; and was extremely puzzled to think what would become of Pyrrhus.

When Sir Roger saw Andromache's obstinate refusal to her lover's importunities, he whispered me in the ear, that he was
sure she would never have him; to which he added, with a more than ordinary vehemence, "You can't imagine, sir, what
'tis to have to do with a widow!" Upon Pyrrhus his threatening afterwards to leave her, the knight shook his head, and
muttered to himself, "Ay, do if you can." This part dwelt so much upon my friend's imagination, that at the close of the
third act, as I was thinking of something else, he whispered in my ear, "These widows, sir, are the most perverse
creatures in the world. But pray," says he, "you that are a critic, is the play according to your dramatic rules, as you call
them? Should your people in tragedy always talk to be understood? Why, there is not a single sentence in this play that I
do not know the meaning of."

The fourth act very luckily begun before I had time to give the old gentleman an answer. "Well," says the knight, sitting
down with great satisfaction, "I suppose we are now to see Hector's ghost." He then renewed his attention, and, from time
to time, fell a praising the widow. He made, indeed, a little mistake as to one of her pages, whom at his first entering he
took for Astyanax; but he quickly set himself right in that particular, though at the same time he owned he should have
been very glad to have seen the little boy, "who," says he, "must needs be a very fine child by the account that is given of
him."

Upon Hermione's going off with a menace to Pyrrhus, the audience gave a loud clap, to which Sir Roger added, "On my
word, a notable young baggage!"

As there was a very remarkable silence and stillness in the audience during the whole action, it was natural for them to
take the opportunity of these intervals between the acts to express their opinion of the players and of their respective
parts. Sir Roger, hearing a cluster of them praise Orestes, struck in with them, and told them that he thought his friend
Pylades was a very sensible man; as they were afterwards applauding Pyrrhus, Sir Roger put in a second time: "And let
me tell you," says he, "though he speaks but little, I like the old fellow in whiskers as well as any of them." Captain
Sentry, seeing two or three wags who sat near us lean with an attentive ear towards Sir Roger, and fearing lest they
should smoke the knight, plucked him by the elbow, and whispered something in his ear that lasted till the opening of the
fifth act. The knight was wonderfully attentive to the account which Orestes gives of Pyrrhus his death, and, at the
conclusion of it, told me it was such a bloody piece of work that he was glad it was not done upon the stage. Seeing
afterwards Orestes in his raving fit, he grew more than ordinary serious, and took occasion to moralize, in his way, upon
an evil conscience, adding that Orestes in his madness looked as if he saw something.

As we were the first that came into the house, so we were the last that went out of it; being resolved to have a clear
passage for our old friend, whom we did not care to venture among the justling of the crowd. Sir Roger went out fully
satisfied with his entertainment, and we guarded him to his lodgings in the same manner that we brought him to the
playhouse; being highly pleased, for my own part, not only with the performance of the excellent piece which had been
presented, but with the satisfaction which it had given to the good old man.

Paper No. 10: The Coverley Ghost

Joseph Addison

Horror ubique animos, simul ipsa silentia terrent.

Virg.

At a little distance from Sir Roger's house, among the ruins of an old abbey, there is a long walk of aged elms, which are
shot up so very high that, when one passes under them, the rooks and crows that rest upon the tops of them seem to be
cawing in another region. I am very much delighted with this sort of noise, which I consider as a kind of natural prayer to
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that Being who supplies the wants of His whole creation, and who, in the beautiful language of the Psalms, feedeth the
young ravens that call upon Him. I like this retirement the better, because of an ill report it lies under of being haunted;
for which reason, as I have been told in the family, no living creature ever walks in it besides the chaplain. My good
friend the butler desired me, with a very grave face, not to venture myself in it after sunset, for that one of the footmen
had been almost frighted out of his wits by a spirit that appeared to him in the shape of a black horse without an head; to
which he added, that about a month ago one of the maids coming home late that way, with a pail of milk upon her head,
heard such a rustling among the bushes that she let it fall.

I was taking a walk in this place last night between the hours of nine and ten, and could not but fancy it one of the most
proper scenes in the world for a ghost to appear in. The ruins of the abbey are scattered up and down on every side, and
half covered with ivy and elder bushes, the harbours of several solitary birds which seldom make their appearance till the
dusk of the evening. The place was formerly a church-yard, and has still several marks in it of graves and burying-places.
There is such an echo among the old ruins and vaults that, if you stamp but a little louder than ordinary, you hear the
sound repeated. At the same time the walk of elms, with the croaking of the ravens which from time to time are heard
from the tops of them, looks exceeding solemn and venerable. These objects naturally raise seriousness and attention; and
when night heightens the awfulness of the place, and pours out her supernumerary horrors upon everything in it, I do not
at all wonder that weak minds fill it with spectres and apparitions.

Mr. Locke, in his chapter of the Association of Ideas, has very curious remarks to show how, by the prejudice of
education, one idea often introduces into the mind a whole set that bear no resemblance to one another in the nature of
things. Among several examples of this kind, he produces the following instance: "The ideas of goblins and sprites have
really no more to do with darkness than light; yet, let but a foolish maid inculcate these often on the mind of a child, and
raise them there together, possibly he shall never be able to separate them again so long as he lives, but darkness shall
ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas, and they shall be so joined that he can no more bear the one than the
other."

As I was walking in this solitude, where the dusk of the evening conspired with so many other occasions of terror, I
observed a cow grazing not far from me, which an imagination that is apt to startle might easily have construed into a
black horse without an head; and I dare say the poor footman lost his wits upon some such trivial occasion.

My friend Sir Roger has often told me, with a great deal of mirth, that at his first coming to his estate, he found three
parts of his house altogether useless: that the best room in it had the reputation of being haunted, and by that means was
locked up; that noises had been heard in his long gallery, so that he could not get a servant to enter it after eight o'clock at
night; that the door of one of his chambers was nailed up, because there went a story in the family that a butler had
formerly hanged himself in it; and that his mother, who lived to a great age, had shut up half the rooms in the house, in
which either her husband, a son, or daughter had died. The knight, seeing his habitation reduced to so small a compass
and himself in a manner shut out of his own house, upon the death of his mother ordered all the apartments to be flung
open and exorcised by his chaplain, who lay in every room one after another, and by that means dissipated the fears
which had so long reigned in the family.

I should not have been thus particular upon these ridiculous horrors, did not I find them so very much prevail in all parts
of the country. At the same time, I think a person who is thus terrified with the imagination of ghosts and spectres much
more reasonable than one who, contrary to the reports of all historians, sacred and profane, ancient and modern, and to
the traditions of all nations, thinks the appearance of spirits fabulous and groundless. Could not I give myself up to this
general testimony of mankind, I should to the relations of particular persons who are now living, and whom I cannot
distrust in other matters of fact. I might here add, that not only the historians, to whom we may join the poets, but
likewise the philosophers of antiquity have favoured this opinion. Lucretius himself, though by the course of his
philosophy he was obliged to maintain that the soul did not exist separate from the body, makes no doubt of the reality of
apparitions, and that men have often appeared after their death. This I think very remarkable: he was so pressed with the
matter of fact which he could not have the confidence to deny, that he was forced to account for it by one of the most
absurd unphilosophical notions that was ever started. He tells us that the surfaces of all bodies are perpetually flying off
from their respective bodies one after another; and that these surfaces or thin cases that included each other, whilst they
were joined in the body, like the coats of an onion, are sometimes seen entire when they are separated from it; by which
means we often behold the shapes and shadows of persons who are either dead or absent.

I shall dismiss this paper with a story out of Josephus, not so much for the sake of the story itself as for the moral
reflections with which the author concludes it, and which I shall here set down in his own words:

"Glaphyra, the daughter of King Archelaus, after the death of her two first husbands,—being married to a third, who was
brother to her first husband, and so passionately in love with her that he turned off his former wife to make room for this
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marriage,—had a very odd kind of dream. She fancied that she saw her first husband coming towards her, and that she
embraced him with great tenderness; when in the midst of the pleasure which she expressed at the sight of him, he
reproached her after the following manner:

"'Glaphyra,' says he, 'thou hast made good the old saying that women are not to be trusted. Was not I the husband of thy
virginity? Have I not children by thee? How couldst thou forget our loves so far as to enter into a second marriage, and
after that into a third?... However, for the sake of our past loves I shall free thee from thy present reproach, and make thee
mine for ever.'

"Glaphyra told this dream to several women of her acquaintance, and died soon after.

"I thought this story might not be impertinent in this place wherein I speak of those kings. Besides that, the example
deserves to be taken notice of, as it contains a most certain proof of the immortality of the soul, and of divine providence.
If any man thinks these facts incredible, let him enjoy his own opinion to himself, but let him not endeavour to disturb
the belief of others, who by instances of this nature are excited to the study of virtue."

The Coverley Household

Richard Steele

Æsopo ingentem statuam posuere Attici

Servumque collocarunt aeterna in basi,

Patere honoris scirent ut cuncti viam.

Phaed.

The reception, manner of attendance, undisturbed freedom and quiet, which I meet with here in the country, has
confirmed me in the opinion I always had, that the general corruption of manners in servants is owing to the conduct of
masters. The aspect of every one in the family carries so much satisfaction that it appears he knows the happy lot which
has befallen him in being a member of it. There is one particular which I have seldom seen but at Sir Roger's: it is usual
in all other places that servants fly from the parts of the house through which their master is passing; on the contrary,
here, they industriously place themselves in his way; and it is on both sides, as it were, understood as a visit, when the
servants appear without calling. This proceeds from the humane and equal temper of the man of the house, who also
perfectly well knows how to enjoy a great estate with such economy as ever to be much beforehand. This makes his own
mind untroubled, and consequently unapt to vent peevish expressions, or give passionate or inconsistent orders to those
about him. Thus respect and love go together; and a certain cheerfulness in performance of their duty is the particular
distinction of the lower part of this family. When a servant is called before his master, he does not come with an
expectation to hear himself rated for some trivial fault, threatened to be stripped, or used with any other unbecoming
language, which mean masters often give to worthy servants: but it is often to know what road he took that he came so
readily back according to order; whether he passed by such a ground; if the old man who rents it is in good health; or
whether he gave Sir Roger's love to him, or the like.

A man who preserves a respect founded on his benevolence to his dependants lives rather like a prince than a master in
his family; his orders are received as favours rather than duties; and the distinction of approaching him is part of the
reward for executing what is commanded by him.

There is another circumstance in which my friend excels in his management, which is the manner of rewarding his
servants. He has ever been of opinion that giving his cast clothes to be worn by valets has a very ill effect upon little
minds, and creates a silly sense of equality between the parties, in persons affected only with outward things. I have
heard him often pleasant on this occasion, and describe a young gentleman abusing his man in that coat which a month or
two before was the most pleasing distinction he was conscious of in himself. He would turn his discourse still more
pleasantly upon the ladies' bounties of this kind; and I have heard him say he knew a fine woman who distributed rewards
and punishments in giving becoming or unbecoming dresses to her maids.

But my good friend is above these little instances of good-will, in bestowing only trifles on his servants; a good servant
to him is sure of having it in his choice very soon of being no servant at all. As I before observed, he is so good an
husband, and knows so thoroughly that the skill of the purse is the cardinal virtue of this life, —I say, he knows so well
that frugality is the support of generosity, that he can often spare a large fine when a tenement falls, and give that
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settlement to a good servant who has a mind to go into the world, or make a stranger pay the fine to that servant, for his
more comfortable maintenance, if he stays in his service.

A man of honour and generosity considers it would be miserable to himself to have no will but that of another, though it
were of the best person breathing, and for that reason goes on as fast as he is able to put his servants into independent
livelihoods. The greatest part of Sir Roger's estate is tenanted by persons who have served himself or his ancestors. It was
to me extremely pleasant to observe the visitants from several parts to welcome his arrival into the country; and all the
difference that I could take notice of between the late servants who came to see him and those who stayed in the family,
was that these latter were looked upon as finer gentlemen and better courtiers.

This manumission and placing them in a way of livelihood I look upon as only what is due to a good servant, which
encouragement will make his successor be as diligent, as humble, and as ready as he was. There is something wonderful
in the narrowness of those minds which can be pleased, and be barren of bounty to those who please them.

One might, on this occasion, recount the sense that great persons in all ages have had of the merit of their dependants,
and the heroic services which men have done their masters in the extremity of their fortunes, and shown to their undone
patrons that fortune was all the difference between them; but as I design this my speculation only as a gentle admonition
to thankless masters, I shall not go out of the occurrences of common life, but assert it, as a general observation, that I
never saw, but in Sir Roger's family and one or two more, good servants treated as they ought to be. Sir Roger's kindness
extends to their children's children, and this very morning he sent his coachman's grandson to prentice. I shall conclude
this paper with an account of a picture in his gallery, where there are many which will deserve my future observation.

At the very upper end of this handsome structure I saw the portraiture of two young men standing in a river,—the one
naked, the other in a livery. The person supported seemed half dead, but still so much alive as to show in his face
exquisite joy and love towards the other. I thought the fainting figure resembled my friend Sir Roger; and, looking at the
butler, who stood by me, for an account of it, he informed me that the person in the livery was a servant of Sir Roger's,
who stood on the shore while his master was swimming, and observing him taken with some sudden illness, and sink
under water, jumped in and saved him. He told me Sir Roger took off the dress he was in as soon as he came home, and
by a great bounty at that time, followed by his favour ever since, had made him master of that pretty seat which we saw
at a distance as we came to this house. I remembered indeed Sir Roger said there lived a very worthy gentleman, to
whom he was highly obliged, without mentioning anything further. Upon my looking a little dissatisfied at some part of
the picture, my attendant informed me that it was against Sir Roger's will, and at the earnest request of the gentleman
himself, that he was drawn in the habit in which he had saved his master.

Charles Lamb
The Praise of Chimney Sweepers

I like to meet a sweep -- understand me -- not a grown sweeper -- old chimney-sweepers are by no means attractive -- but
one of those tender novices, blooming through their first nigritude, the maternal washings not quite effaced from the
cheek -- such as come forth with the dawn, or somewhat earlier, with their little professional notes sounding like the peep
peep of a young sparrow; or liker to the matin lark should I pronounce them, in their aerial ascents not seldom
anticipating the sun-rise?

I have a kindly yearning towards these dim specks -- poor blots -- innocent blacknesses -

I reverence these young Africans of our own growth -- these almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth without
assumption; and from their little pulpits (the tops of chimneys), in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a
lesson of patience to mankind.

When a child, what a mysterious pleasure it was to witness their operation! to see a chit no bigger than one's-self enter,
one knew not by what process, into what seemed the fauces Averni -- to pursue him in imagination, as he went sounding
on through so many dark stifling caverns, horrid shades -- to shudder with the idea that "now, surely, he must be lost for
ever! " -- to revive at hearing his feeble shout of discovered day-light -- and then (O fulness of delight) running out of
doors, to come just in time to see the sable phenomenon emerge in safety, the brandished weapon of his art victorious
like some flag waved over a conquered citadel! I seem to remember having been told, that a bad sweep was once left in a
stack with his brush, to indicate which way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle certainly; not much unlike the old
stage direction in Macbeth, where the "Apparition of a child crowned with a tree in his hand rises."
 P a g e | 22

Reader, if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy early rambles, it is good to give him a penny. It is better to give
him two-pence. If it be starving weather, and to the proper troubles of his hard occupation, a pair of kibed heels (no
unusual accompaniment) be superadded, the demand on thy humanity will surely rise to a tester.

There is a composition, the ground-work of which I have understood to be the sweet wood `yclept sassafras. This wood
boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar, hath to some tastes a delicacy beyond the
China luxury. I know not how thy palate may relish it; for myself, with every deference to the judicious Mr. Read, who
hath time out of mind kept open a shop (the only one he avers in London) for the vending of this "wholesome and
pleasant beverage, on the south side of Fleet-street, as thou approachest Bridge-street -- the only Salopian house, -- I have
never yet adventured to dip my own particular lip in a basin of his commended ingredient -- a cautious premonition to the
olfactories constantly whispering to me, that my stomach must infallibly, with all due courtesy, decline it. Yet I have seen
palates, otherwise not uninstructed in dietetical elegances, sup it up with avidity.

I know not by what particular conformation of the organ it happens, but I have always found that this composition is
surprisingly gratifying to the palate of a young chimney-sweeper --- whether the oily particles (sassafras is slightly
oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous concretions, which are sometimes found (in dissections) to adhere to
the roof of the mouth in these unfledged practitioners or whether Nature, sensible that she had mingled too much of bitter
wood in the lot of these raw victims, caused to grow out of the earth her sassafras for a sweet lenitive but so it is, that no
possible taste or odour to the senses of a young chimney-sweeper can convey a delicate excitement comparable to this
mixture. Being penniless, they will yet hang their black heads over the ascending steam, to gratify one sense if possible,
seemingly no less pleased than those domestic animals -- cats -- when they purr over a new-found sprig of valerian.
There is something more in these sympathies than philosophy can inculcate.

Now albeit Mr. Read boasteth, not without reason, that his is the only Salopion house; yet he it known to thee, reader -- if
thou art one who keepest what are called good hours, thou art haply ignorant of the fact -- he hath a race of industrious
imitators, who from stalls, and under open sky, dispense the same savoury mess to humbler customers, at that dead time
of the dawn, when (as extremes meet) the rake, reeling home from his midnight cups, and the hard- handed artisan
leaving his bed to resume the premature labours of the day, jostle, not unfrequently to the manifest disconcerting of the
former, for the honours of the pavement. It is the time when, in summer, between the expired and the not yet relumined
kitchen- fires, the kennels of our fair metropolis give forth their least satisfactory odours. The rake, who wisheth to
dissipate his o'ernight vapours in more grateful coffee, curses the ungenial fume, as he passeth; but the artisan stops to
taste, and blesses the fragrant breakfast.

This is Saloop -- the precocious herb-woman's darling -- the delight of the early gardener, who transports his smoking
cabbages by break of day from Hammersmith to Covent-garden's famed piazzas -- the delight, and, oh I fear, too often
the envy, of the unpennied sweep. Him shouldest thou haply encounter, with his dim visage pendent over the grateful
steam, regale him with a sumptuous basin (it will cost thee but three halfpennies) and a slice of delicate bread and butter
(an added halfpenny) -- so may thy culinary fires, eased of the o'er-charged secretions from thy worse-placed
hospitalities, curl up a lighter volume to the welkin -- so may the descending soot never taint thy costly well-ingredienced
soups -- nor the odious cry, quick-reaching from street to street, of the fired chimney, invite the rattling engines from ten
adjacent parishes, to disturb for a casual scintillation thy peace and pocket!

I am by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts; the jeers and taunts of the populace; the low-bred triumph they
display over the casual trip, or splashed stocking, of a gentleman. Yet can I endure the jocularity of a young sweep with
something more than forgiveness. In the last winter but one, pacing along Cheap-side with my accustomed precipitation
when I walk westward, a treacherous slide brought me upon my back in an instant. I scrambled up with pain and shame
enough -- yet outwardly trying to face it down, as if nothing had happened -- when the roguish grin of one of these young
wits encountered me. There he stood, pointing me out with his dusky finger to the mob, and to a poor woman (I suppose
his mother) in particular, till the tears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) worked themselves out at the
corners of his poor red eyes, red from many a previous weeping, and soot- inflamed, yet twinkling through all with such
a joy, snatched out of desolation, that Hogarth -- but Hogarth has got him already (how could he miss him?) in the March
to Finchley, grinning at the pye-man -- there he stood, as he stands in the picture, irremovable, as if the jest was to last for
ever -- with such a maximum of glee, and minimum of mischief, in his mirth -- for the grin of a genuine sweep hath
absolutely no malice in it -- that I could have been content, if the honour of a gentleman might endure it, to have
remained his butt and his mockery till midnight.

I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are called a fine set of teeth. Every pair of rosy lips (the ladies must
pardon me) is a casket, presumably holding such jewels; but, methinks, they should take leave to "air " them as frugally
as possible. The fine lady, or fine gentleman, who show me their teeth, show me bones. Yet must I confess, that from the
 P a g e | 23

mouth of a true sweep a display (even to ostentation) of those white and shining ossifications, strikes me as an agreeable
anomaly in manners, and an allowable piece of foppery. It is, as when

A sable cloud

Turns forth her silver lining on the night.

It is like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct; a badge of better days; a hint of nobility -- and, doubtless, under the
obscuring darkness and double night of their forlorn disguisement, oftentimes lurketh good blood, and gentle conditions,
derived from lost ancestry, and a lapsed pedigree. The premature apprenticements of these tender victims give but too
much encouragement, I fear, to clandestine, and almost infantile abductions; the seeds of civility and true courtesy, so
often discernible in these young grafts (not otherwise to be accounted for) plainly hint at some forced adoptions; many
noble Rachels mourning for their children, even in our days, countenance the fact; the tales of fairy-spiriting may shadow
a lamentable verity, and the recovery of the young Montagu be but a solitary instance of good fortune, out of many
irreparable and hopeless defiliations.

In one of the state-beds at Arundel castle, a few years since under a ducal canopy -- (that seat of the Howards is an object
of curiosity to visitors, chiefly for its beds, in which the late duke was especially a connoisseur) encircled with curtains of
delicatest crimson, with starry coronets inwoven -- folded between a pair of sheets whiter and softer than the lap where
Venus lulled Ascanius was discovered by chance, after all methods of search had failed, at noon-day, fast asleep, a lost
chimney-sweeper. The little creature, having somehow confounded his passage among the intricacies of those lordly
chimneys, by some unknown aperture had alighted upon this magnificent chamber; and, tired with his tedious
explorations, was unable to resist the delicious invitement to repose, which he there saw exhibited; so, creeping between
the sheets very quietly, laid his black head upon the pillow, and slept. like a young Howard.

Such is the account given to the visitors at the Castle. -- But I cannot help seeming to perceive a confirmation of what I
have just hinted at in this story. A high instinct was at work in the case, or I am mistaken. Is it probable that a poor child
of that description, with whatever weariness he might be visited, would have ventured, under such a penalty, as he would
be taught to expect, to uncover the sheets of a Duke's bed, and deliberately to lay himself down between them, when the
rug, or the carpet, presented an obvious couch, still far above his pretension -- is this probable, I would ask, if the great
power of nature, which I contend for, had not been manifested within him, prompting to the adventure? Doubtless this
young nobleman (for such my mind misgives me that he must be) was allured by some memory, not amounting to full
consciousness, of his condition in infancy, when be was used to be lapt by his mother, or his nurse, in just such sheets as
he there found, into which he was now but creeping back as into his proper incunabula, and resting-place. -- By no other
theory, than by this sentiment of a pre-existent state (as I may call it), can I explain a deed so venturous, and, indeed, any
other system, so indecorous, in this tender, but unseasonable sleeper.

My pleasant friend Jem White was so impressed with a belief of metamorphoses like this frequently taking place, that in
some sort to reverse the wrongs of fortune in these poor changelings, he instituted an annual feast of chimney-sweepers,
at which it was his pleasure to officiate as host and waiter. It was a solemn supper held in Smithfield, upon the yearly
return of the fair of St. Bartholomew. Cards were issued a week before to the master-sweeps in and about the metropolis,
confining the invitation to their younger fry. Now and then an elderly stripling would get in among us, and be good-
naturedly winked at; but our main body were infantry. One unfortunate wight, indeed, who, relying upon his dusky suit,
had intruded himself into our party, but by tokens was providentially discovered in time to be no chimney.sweeper (all is
not soot which looks so), was quoited out of the presence with universal indignation, as not having on the wedding
garment; but in general the greatest harmony prevailed. The place chosen was a convenient spot among the pens, at the
north side of the fair, not so far distant as to be impervious to the agreeable hub-hub of that vanity; but remote enough not
to be obvious to the interruption of every gaping spectator in it. The guests assembled about seven. In those little
temporary parlours three tables were spread with napery, not so fine as substantial, and at every board a comely hostess
presided with her pan of hissing sausages. The nostrils of the young rogues dilated at the savour. James White, as head
waiter, had charge of the first table; and myself, with our trusty companion Bigod, ordinarily ministered to the other two.
There was clambering and jostling, you may he sure, who should get at the first table -- for Rochester in his maddest days
could not have done the humours of the scene with more spirit than my friend. After some general expression of thanks
for the honour the company had done him, his inaugural ceremony was to clasp the greasy waist of old dame Ursula (the
fattest of the three), that stood frying and fretting, half-blessing, half-cursing "the gentleman," and imprint upon her
chaste lips a tender salute, whereat the universal host would set up a shout that tore the concave, while hundreds of
grinning teeth startled the night with their brightness. O it was a pleasure to see the sable younkers lick in the unctuous
meat, with his more unctuous sayings -- how he would fit the tit bits to the puny mouths, reserving the lengthier links for
the seniors -- how he would intercept a morsel even in the jaws of some young desperado, declaring it "must to the pan
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again to be browned, for it was not fit for a gentleman's eating" -- how he would recommend this slice of white bread, or
that piece of kissing-crust, to a tender juvenile, advising them all to have a care of cracking their teeth, which were their
best patrimony, how genteelly he would deal about the small ale, as if it were wine, naming the brewer, and protesting, if
it were not good, he should lose their custom; with a special recommendation to wipe the lip before drinking. Then we
had our toasts -- " The King," -- the "Cloth," -- which, whether they understood or not, was equally diverting and
flattering; -- and for a crowning sentiment, which never failed, "May the Brush supersede the Laurel!" All these, and fifty
other fancies, which were rather felt than comprehended by his guests, would he utter, standing upon tables, and
prefacing every sentiment with a "Gentlemen, give me leave to propose so and so," which was a prodigious comfort to
those young orphans; every now and then stuffing into his mouth (for it did not do to be squeamish on these occasions)
indiscriminate pieces of those reeking sausages, which pleased them mightily, and was the savouriest part, you may
believe, of the entertainment.

Golden lads and lasses must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust –

James White is extinct, and with him these suppers have long ceased. He carried away with him half the fun of the world
when he died -- of my world at least. His old clients look for him among the pens; and, missing him, reproach the altered
feast of St. Bartholomew, and the glory of Smithfield departed for ever.

Imperfect Sympathies

I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathizeth with all things, I have no antipathy, or rather
idiosyncracy in any thing. Those national repugnancies do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French,
Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch -- Religio Medici.

That the author of the Religio Medici, mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and
conjectural essences; in whose categories of Being the possible took the upper hand of the actual; should have
overlooked the impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as mankind, is not much to be admired. It is rather to
be wondered at, that in the genus of animals he should have condescended to distinguish that species at all. For myself-
earth.hound and fettered to the scene of my activities, --

Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky,

I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no
indifferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste; or when once it becomes
indifferent, it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices -- made up of likings and dislikings
-- veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be said of me that I am a lover of my
species. I can feel for all indifferently, but I cannot feel towards all equally. The more purely-English wont that expresses
sympathy will better explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, who upon another account cannot be my
mate or fellow. I cannot like all people alike. *

[Footnote] * I would be understood as confining myself to the subject of imperfect sympathies To nations or classes of
men there can be no direct antipathy. There may *be individuals born and constellated so opposite to another individual
nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them. I have met with my moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two
persons meeting (who never saw one another before in their lives) and instantly fighting.

-- We by proof find there should be

`Twixt man and man such an antipathy,

That though he can show no just reason why

For any former wrong or injury,

Can neither find a blemish in his fame,

Nor aught in face or feature justly blame,

Can challenge or accuse him of no evil,

 P a g e | 25

Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil.

The lines are from old Heywood's "Hierarchie of Angels," and he subjoins a curious story in confirmation, of a Spaniard
who attempted to assassinate a King Ferdinand of Spain, and being put to the rack could give no other reason for the deed
but an inveterate antipathy which he had taken to the first sight of the King.

-- The cause which to that act compell'd him

Was, he ne'er loved him since he first beheld him.

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot
like me -- and in truth, I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it. There is something more plain and
ingenuous in their mode of proceeding. We know one another at first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects
(under which mine must be content to rank) which in its constitution is essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the
sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive. They have no pretences to much clearness
or precision in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few
whole pieces in it. They are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She presents no full front to them -- a
feature or side-face at the most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost they pretend to.
They beat up a little game peradventure -- and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions, to run it down. The
light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable and shifting: waxing, and again waning. Their conversation is
accordingly. They will throw out a random word in or out of season, and be content to let it pass for what it is worth.
They cannot speak always as if they were upon their oath -- but must be understood, speaking or writing, with some
abatement. The seldom wait to mature a proposition, but e'en bring it to market in the green ear. They delight to impart
their defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting for their full developement. They are no systematizers, and
would but err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said before, are suggestive merely. The brain of a true Caledonian
(if I am not mistaken) is constituted upon quite a different plan. His Minerva is born in panoply. You are never admitted
to see his ideas in their growth -- if, indeed, they do grow, and are not rather put together upon principles of clock-work.
You never catch his mind in an undress. He never hints or suggests any thing, hut unlades his stock of ideas in perfect
order and completeness. He brings his total wealth into company, and gravely unpacks it. His riches are always about
him. He never stoops to catch a glittering something in your presence, to share it with you, before he quite knows
whether it be true touch or not. You cannot cry halves to any thing that he finds. He does not find, but bring. You never
witness his first apprehension of a thing. His understanding is always at its meridian -- you never see the first dawn, the
early streaks. -- He has no falterings of self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-
consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place in his brain, or vocabulary. The
twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox -- he has no doubts. Is he an infidel -- he has none either.
Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with him. You cannot hover with him upon the confines
of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot make excursions with him
-- for he sets you right. His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates. He cannot compromise, or understand
middle actions. There can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book. His affirmations have the sanctity of
an oath. You must speak upon the square with him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy's country.
"A healthy book" -- said one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle, -- "did I
catch rightly what you said? I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how that
epithet can be properly applied to a book." Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap
an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your oath. I have a
print of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr. ****. After he had examined it
minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked MY BEAUTY (a foolish name it goes by among my friends) -- when he
very gravely assured me, that "he had considerable respect for my character and talents" (so he was pleased to say), "but
had not given himself much thought about the degree of my personal pretensions." The misconception staggered me, but
did not seem much to disconcert him. -- Persons of this nation are particularly bond of affirming a truth -- which nobody
doubts. They do not so properly affirm, as annunciate it. They do indeed appear to have such a love of truth (as if, like
virtue, it were valuable for itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable, whether the proposition that contains it be new
or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to become a subject of disputation. I was present not long since at a party of
North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way),
that I wished it were the father instead of the son -- when four of them started up at once to inform me, that "that was
impossible, because he was dead." An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive. Swift has hit off
this part of their character, namely their love of truth, in his biting way, but with an illiberality that necessarily confines
the passage to the margin. The tediousness of these people is certainly provoking. I wonder if they ever tire one another! -
- In my early life I had a passionate fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have sometimes foolishly hoped to ingratiate
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myself with his countrymen by expressing it. But I have always found that a true Scot resents your admiration of his
compatriot, even more than he would your contempt of him. The latter he imputes to your "imperfect acquaintance with
many of the words which he uses;" and the same objection makes it a presumption in you to suppose that you can admire
him. -- Thomson they seem to have forgotten. Smollett they have neither forgotten nor forgiven for his delineation of
Rory and his companion, upon their first introduction to our metropolis. -- Speak of Smollett as a great genius, and they
will retort upon you Hume's History compared with his Continuation of it. What if the historian had continued Humphrey
Clinker?

[Footnote] * There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit themselves, and entertain their company, with
relating facts of no consequence, not at all out of the road of such common incidents as happen every day; and this I have
observed more frequently among the Scots than any other nation, who are very careful not to omit the minutest
circumstances of time or place; which kind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved by the uncouth terms and phrases,
as well as accent and gesture peculiar to that country, would be hardly tolerable. -- Hints towards an Essay on
Conversation.

I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is
in its nonage. They date beyond the pyramids. But I should not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that
nation. I confess that I have not the nerves to enter their synagogues. Old prejudices cling about me. I cannot shake off
the story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and hate, on the one side, -- of cloaked revenge,
dissimulation, and hate, on the other, between our and their fathers, must, and ought, to affect the blood of the children. I
cannot believe it can run clear and kindly yet; or that a few fine words, such as candour, liberality, the light of a
nineteenth century, can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. He is least
distasteful on `Change -- for the mercantile spirit levels all distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly confess
that I do not relish the approximation of Jew and Christian, which has become so fashionable. The reciprocal
endearments have, to me, something hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not like to see the Church and Synagogue
kissing and congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civility. If they are converted, why do they not come over to us
altogether? Why keep up a form of separation, when the life of it is fled? If they can sit with us at table, why do they
keck at our cookery? I do not understand these half convertites. Jews christianizing -- Christians judaizing -- puzzle me. I
like fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. The spirit of the
synagogue is essentially separative. B----- would have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his
forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, which nature meant to be of ---- Christians. The Hebrew spirit is strong in
him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. How it breaks out, when he sings, "The Children of
Israel passed through the Red Sea!" The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our necks in
triumph. There is no mistaking him. -- has a strong expression of sense in his countenance, and it is confirmed by his
singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence is use. He sings with understanding, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He
would sing the Commandments, and give an appropriate character to each prohibition. His nation, in general, have not
ever-sensible countenances. How should they ? -- but you seldom see a silly expression among them. Gain, and the
pursuit of gain, sharpen a man's visage. I never heard of an idiot being horn among them. -- Some admire the Jewish
female-physiognomy. I admire it -- but with trembling. Jael had those full dark inscrutable eyes.

In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards
some of these faces -- or rather masks -- that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and
highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls -- these "images of God cut in ebony." But I should not like to associate
with them, to share my meals and my good-nights with them -- because they are black.

I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I venerate the Quaker principles. It does me good for the rest of the day when I
meet any of their people in my path. When I am ruffled or disturbed by any occurrence, the sight, or quiet voice of a
Quaker, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and taking off a load from the bosom. But I cannot like the
Quakers (as Desdemona would say) "to live with them." I am all over sophisticated -- with humours, fancies, craving
hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim-
whams, which their simpler taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive banquet. My appetites are too high for
the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve dressed for the angel, my gusto too excited

To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse.

The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to return to a question put to them may be explained, I think,
without the vulgar assumption, that they are more given to evasion and equivocating than other people. They naturally
look to their words more carefully, and are more cautious of committing themselves. They have a peculiar character to
keep up on this head. They stand in a manner upon their veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an oath. The
 P a g e | 27

custom of resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed)
to introduce into the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of truth -- the one applicable to the solemn affairs of
justice, and the other to the common proceedings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can
be but truth, so in the common affirmations of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected, and conceded upon
questions wanting this solemn covenant. Something less than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person say, "You do
not expect me to speak as if I were upon my oath." Hence a great deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short of
falsehood, creeps into ordinary conversation; and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth -- oath-
truth, by the nature of the circumstances, is not required. A Quaker knows none of this distinction. His simple affirmation
being received, upon the most sacred occasions, without any further test, stamps a value upon the words which he is to
use upon the most indifferent topics of life. He looks to them, naturally, with more severity. You can have of him no
more than his word. He knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual expression, be forfeits, for himself, at least, his claim
to the invidious exemption. He knows that his syllables are weighed -- and how far a consciousness of this particular
watchfulness, exerted against a person, has a tendency to produce indirect answers, and a diverting of the question by
honest means, might be illustrated, and the practice justified, by a more sacred example than is proper to be adduced
upon this occasion. The admirable presence of mind, which is notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, might be
traced to this imposed self-watchfulness -- if it did not seem rather an humble and secular scion of that old stock of
religious constancy, which never bent or faltered, in the Primitive Friends, or gave way to the winds of persecution, to the
violence of judge or accuser, under trials and racking examinations. "You will never be the wiser, if I sit here answering
your questions till midnight," said one of those upright Justicers to Penn, who had been putting law-cases with a puzzling
subtlety. "Thereafter as the answers may be," retorted the Quaker. The astonishing composure of this people is sometimes
ludicrously displayed in lighter instances. -- I was travelling in a stage-coach with three male Quakers, buttoned up in the
straitest non-conformity of their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea apparatus, partly supper,
was set before us. My friends confined themselves to the tea-table. I in my way took supper. When the landlady brought
in the bill, the eldest of my companions discovered that she had charged for both meals. This was resisted. Mine hostess
was very clamorous and positive. Some mild arguments were used on the part of the Quakers, for which the heated mind
of the good lady seemed by no means a fit recipient. The guard came in with his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers
pulled out their money, and formally tendered it -- so much for tea -- I, in humble imitation, tendering mine -- for the
supper which I had taken. She would not relax in her demand. So they all three quietly put up their silver as did myself,
and marched out of the room, the eldest and gravest going first, with myself closing up the rear, who thought I could not
do better than follow the example of such grave and warrantable personages. We got in. The steps went up. The coach
drove off. The murmurs of mine hostess, not very indistinctly or ambiguously pronounced, became after a time inaudible
-- and now my conscience, which the whimsical scene had for a while suspended, beginning to give some twitches, I
waited, in the hope that some justification would be offered by these serious persons for the seeming injustice of their
conduct. To my great surprise, not a syllable was dropped on the subject. They sate as mute as at a meeting. At length the
eldest of them broke silence, by inquiring of his next neighbour, "Hast thee heard how indigos go at the India House?"
and the question operated as a soporific on my moral feeling as far as Exeter.

The New Year’s Eve

EVERY man hath two birth-days; two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it
affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old
observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper birth-day hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect
nothing at all about the matter, nor understand any thing in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a New Year is of
an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It
is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

Of all sounds of all bell -- (bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven) -- most solemn and touching is the peal
which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that
have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected in that regretted time. I
begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal colour; nor was it a poetical flight in a contemporary,
when he exclaimed

I saw the skirts of the departing Year.

It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems to he conscious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I
felt it, and all felt it with me, last night; though some of my companions. affected rather to manifest an exhilaration at the
birth of the coming year, than any very tender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. But I am none of those who -
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Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties: new books, new faces, new years, -- from some mental twist which makes it
difficult. in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other
(former) years. I plunge into foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past disappointments. I am
armour-proof against old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over again for love, as
the gamesters phrase it, games, for which I once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents
and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel. Methinks, it
is better that I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair, and fairer eyes, of
Alice W--n , than that so passionate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should have missed that
legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco, and be
without the idea of that specious old rogue.

In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox, when I say,
that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love himself, without the imputation of self-
love?

If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective -- and mine is painfully so -- can have a less respect for his
present identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome; a notorious * * *
addicted to * * * * : averse from counsel, neither taking it, nor offering it: -- * * * besides; a stammering buffoon; what
you will; lay it on, and spare not: I subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou canst be willing to lay at his door -- -- --
but for the child Elia -- that "other me," there, in the back-ground -- I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that
young master -- with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of
some other house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher medicaments. I can lay
its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ's, and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal
tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the least colour of
falsehood. -- God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated. -- I know how honest, how courageous
(for a weakling) it was -- how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful! From what have I not fallen, if the child I
remember was indeed myself, -- and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my
unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being!

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly
idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project
myself enough out of myself: and having no offspring of my own to daily with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my
own early idea, as my heir and favourite If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader -- (a busy man, perchance),
if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly-conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the
phantom cloud of Elia.

The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old
institution; and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. -- In those
days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to bring a train
of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that
concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it
indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more
than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. But now, shall I confess a truth ?
-- I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the
expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like miser's farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I
set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not
content to pass away "like a weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of
mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity: and reluct at the inevitable
course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and
the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am
arrived; I, and my friends: to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like
mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. -- Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and
discomposes me. My household gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not
willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me.
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Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices
of meats and fishes and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent
vanities, and jests, and irony itself -- these things go out with life?

Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my
embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by
this familiar process of reading?

Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here, -- the recognisable face --
the "sweet assurance of a look" -- ?

In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying -- to give it its mildest name -- does more especially haunt and beset me.
In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as
myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and burgeon. Then are we as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again,
and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied to the
insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and
spectral appearances, -- that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sister, like that innutritious one denounced in the
Canticles : -- I am none of her minions -- I hold with the Persian.

Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into my mind. All partial evils, like humours, run into that
capital plague-sore. -- I have heard some profess an indifference to life. Such hail the end of their existence as a port of
refuge; and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in which they may slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed death -
- -- -- but out upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly phantom! I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) give thee to six-
score thousand devils, as in no instance to be excused or tolerated, but shunned as a universal viper; to be branded,
proscribed, and spoken evil of! In no way can I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy Privation, or more
frightful and confounding Positive!

Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are altogether frigid and insulting, like thyself. For what satisfaction
hath a man, that he shall "lie down with kings and emperors in death," who in his life-time never greatly coveted the
society of such bed-fellows ? -- or, forsooth, that "so shall the fairest face appear? " -- why, to comfort me, must Alice
W--n be a goblin? More than all, I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon
your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such
as he now is, I must shortly he." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the mean-time I am alive. I move
about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters! Thy New Years' Days are past. I survive, a jolly candidate for 1821.
Another cup of wine -- and while that turn-coat bell, that just now mournfully chanted the obsequies of 1820 departed,
with changed notes lustily rings in a successor, let us attune to its peal the song made on a like occasion, by hearty,
cheerful Mr. Cotton. -

THE NEW YEAR.

Hark, the cock crows, and yon bright star

Tells us, the day himself's not far;

And see where, breaking from the night,

He gilds the western hills with light.

With him old Janus doth appear,

Peeping into the future year,

With such a look as seems to say,

The prospect is not good that way.

Thus do we rise ill sights to see,

And `gainst ourselves to prophesy;

When the prophetic fear of things

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A more tormenting mischief brings,

More full of soul-tormenting gall,

Than direst mischiefs can befall.

But stay ! but stay! methinks my sight,

Better inform'd by clearer light

Discerns sereneness in that brow,

That all contracted seem'd but now.

His revers'd face may show distaste,

And frown upon the ills are past;

But that which this way looks is clear,

And smiles upon the New-born Year.

He looks too from a place so high,

The Year lies open to his eye;

And all the moments open are

To the exact discoverer.

Yet more and more he smiles upon

The happy revolution.

Why should we then suspect or fear

The influences of a year,

So smiles upon us the first morn,

And speaks us good so soon as born?

Plague on't! the last was ill enough,

This cannot but make better proof;

Or, at the worst, as we brush'd through

The last, why so we may this too;

And then the next in reason shou'd

Be superexcellently good:

For the worst ills (we daily see)

Have no more perpetuity,

Than the best fortunes that do fall;

Which also bring us wherewithal

Longer their being to support,

Than those do of the other sort:

And who has one good year in three,

And yet repines at destiny, [p 32]

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Appears ungrateful in the case,

And merits not the good he has.

Then let us welcome the New Guest

With lusty brimmers of the best;

Mirth always should Good Fortune meet,

And renders e'en Disaster sweet:

And though the Princess turn her back,

Let us but line ourselves with sack,

We better shall by far hold out,

Till the next Year she face about.

How say you, reader -- do not these verses smack of the rough magnanimity of the old English vein? Do they not fortify
like a cordial; enlarging the heart, and productive of sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the concoction? Where be those
puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected ? --passed like a cloud -- absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear
poetry -- clean washed away by a wave of genuine Helicon, your only Spa for these hypochondries -- And now another
cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, and many of them, to you all, my masters!

Thomas Carlyle
The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns [Lecture V, May 19, 1840]

Hero-Gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism that belong to the old ages, make their appearance in the
remotest times; some of them have ceased to be possible long since, and cannot any more show themselves in this world.
The Hero as Man of Letters, again, of which class we are to speak to-day, is altogether a product of these new ages; and
so long as the wondrous art of Writing, or of Ready-writing which we call Printing, subsists, he may be expected to
continue, as one of the main forms of Heroism for all future ages. He is, in various respects, a very singular phenomenon.

He is new, I say; he has hardly lasted above a century in the world yet. Never, till about a hundred years ago, was there
seen any figure of a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavoring to speak forth the inspiration that was
in him by Printed Books, and find place and subsistence by what the world would please to give him for doing that.
Much had been sold and bought, and left to make its own bargain in the market-place; but the inspired wisdom of a
Heroic Soul never till then, in that naked manner. He, with his copy-rights and copy-wrongs, in his squalid garret, in his
rusty coat; ruling (for this is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would, or
would not, give him bread while living, — is a rather curious spectacle! Few shapes of Heroism can be more unexpected.

Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes: the world knows not well at any time what to do
with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world! It seemed absurd to us, that men, in their rude admiration, should take
some wise great Odin for a god, and worship him as such; some wise great Mahomet for one god-inspired, and
religiously follow his Law for twelve centuries: but that a wise great Johnson, a Burns, a Rousseau, should be taken for
some idle nondescript, extant in the world to amuse idleness, and have a few coins and applauses thrown him, that he
might live thereby; this perhaps, as before hinted, will one day seem a still absurder phasis of things! — Meanwhile,
since it is the spiritual always that determines the material, this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most
important modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all. What he teaches, the whole world will do and make.
The world's manner of dealing with him is the most significant feature of the world's general position. Looking well at
his life, we may get a glance, as deep as is readily possible for us, into the life of those singular centuries which have
produced him, in which we ourselves live and work.

There are genuine Men of Letters, and not genuine; as in every kind there is a genuine and a spurious. If hero be taken to
mean genuine, then I say the Hero as Man of Letters will be found discharging a function for us which is ever honorable,
ever the highest; and was once well known to be the highest. He is uttering forth, in such way as he has, the inspired soul
of him; all that a man, in any case, can do. I say inspired; for what we call "originality," "sincerity," "genius," the heroic
quality we have no good name for, signifies that. The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True,
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Divine and Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in that; he declares
that abroad, by act or speech as it may be in declaring himself abroad. His life, as we said before, is a piece of the
everlasting heart of Nature herself: all men's life is, — but the weak many know not the fact, and are untrue to it, in most
times; the strong few are strong, heroic, perennial, because it cannot be hidden from them. The Man of Letters, like every
Hero, is there to proclaim this in such sort as he can. Intrinsically it is the same function which the old generations named
a man Prophet, Priest, Divinity for doing; which all manner of Heroes, by speech or by act, are sent into the world to do.

Fichte the German Philosopher delivered, some forty years ago at Erlangen, a highly remarkable Course of Lectures on
this subject: "Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten, On the Nature of the Literary Man." Fichte, in conformity with the
Transcendental Philosophy, of which he was a distinguished teacher, declares first: That all things which we see or work
with in this Earth, especially we ourselves and all persons, are as a kind of vesture or sensuous Appearance: that under all
there lies, as the essence of them, what he calls the "Divine Idea of the World;" this is the Reality which "lies at the
bottom of all Appearance." To the mass of men no such Divine Idea is recognizable in the world; they live merely, says
Fichte, among the superficialities, practicalities and shows of the world, not dreaming that there is anything divine under
them. But the Man of Letters is sent hither specially that he may discern for himself, and make manifest to us, this same
Divine Idea: in every new generation it will manifest itself in a new dialect; and he is there for the purpose of doing that.
Such is Fichte's phraseology; with which we need not quarrel. It is his way of naming what I here, by other words, am
striving imperfectly to name; what there is at present no name for: The unspeakable Divine Significance, full of splendor,
of wonder and terror, that lies in the being of every man, of every thing, — the Presence of the God who made every man
and thing. Mahomet taught this in his dialect; Odin in his: it is the thing which all thinking hearts, in one dialect or
another, are here to teach.

Fichte calls the Man of Letters, therefore, a Prophet, or as he prefers to phrase it, a Priest, continually unfolding the
Godlike to men: Men of Letters are a perpetual Priesthood, from age to age, teaching all men that a God is still present in
their life, that all "Appearance," whatsoever we see in the world, is but as a vesture for the "Divine Idea of the World,"
for "that which lies at the bottom of Appearance." In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the
world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest; — guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark
pilgrimage through the waste of Time. Fichte discriminates with sharp zeal the true Literary Man, what we here call the
Hero as Man of Letters, from multitudes of false unheroic. Whoever lives not wholly in this Divine Idea, or living
partially in it, struggles not, as for the one good, to live wholly in it, — he is, let him live where else he like, in what
pomps and prosperities he like, no Literary Man; he is, says Fichte, a "Bungler, Stumper." Or at best, if he belong to the
prosaic provinces, he may be a "Hodman; " Fichte even calls him elsewhere a "Nonentity," and has in short no mercy for
him, no wish that he should continue happy among us! This is Fichte's notion of the Man of Letters. It means, in its own
form, precisely what we here mean.

In this point of view, I consider that, for the last hundred years, by far the notablest of all Literary Men is Fichte's
countryman, Goethe. To that man too, in a strange way, there was given what we may call a life in the Divine Idea of the
World; vision of the inward divine mystery: and strangely, out of his Books, the world rises imaged once more as
godlike, the workmanship and temple of a God. Illuminated all, not in fierce impure fire-splendor as of Mahomet, but in
mild celestial radiance; — really a Prophecy in these most unprophetic times; to my mind, by far the greatest, though one
of the quietest, among all the great things that have come to pass in them. Our chosen specimen of the Hero as Literary
Man would be this Goethe. And it were a very pleasant plan for me here to discourse of his heroism: for I consider him to
be a true Hero; heroic in what he said and did, and perhaps still more in what he did not say and did not do; to me a noble
spectacle: a great heroic ancient man, speaking and keeping silence as an ancient Hero, in the guise of a most modern,
high-bred, high-cultivated Man of Letters! We have had no such spectacle; no man capable of affording such, for the last
hundred and fifty years.

But at present, such is the general state of knowledge about Goethe, it were worse than useless to attempt speaking of
him in this case. Speak as I might, Goethe, to the great majority of you, would remain problematic, vague; no impression
but a false one could be realized. Him we must leave to future times. Johnson, Burns, Rousseau, three great figures from
a prior time, from a far inferior state of circumstances, will suit us better here. Three men of the Eighteenth Century; the
conditions of their life far more resemble what those of ours still are in England, than what Goethe's in Germany were.
Alas, these men did not conquer like him; they fought bravely, and fell. They were not heroic bringers of the light, but
heroic seekers of it. They lived under galling conditions; struggling as under mountains of impediment, and could not
unfold themselves into clearness, or victorious interpretation of that "Divine Idea." It is rather the Tombs of three Literary
Heroes that I have to show you. There are the monumental heaps, under which three spiritual giants lie buried. Very
mournful, but also great and full of interest for us. We will linger by them for a while.
 P a g e | 33

decorated initial 'H'omplaint is often made, in these times, of what we call the disorganized condition of society: how ill
many forces of society fulfil their work; how many powerful are seen working in a wasteful, chaotic, altogether
unarranged manner. It is too just a complaint, as we all know. But perhaps if we look at this of Books and the Writers of
Books, we shall find here, as it were, the summary of all other disorganizations; — a sort of heart, from which, and to
which all other confusion circulates in the world! Considering what Book writers do in the world, and what the world
does with Book writers, I should say, It is the most anomalous thing the world at present has to show. — We should get
into a sea far beyond sounding, did we attempt to give account of this: but we must glance at it for the sake of our
subject. The worst element in the life of these three Literary Heroes was, that they found their business and position such
a chaos. On the beaten road there is tolerable travelling; but it is sore work, and many have to perish, fashioning a path
through the impassable!

Our pious Fathers, feeling well what importance lay in the speaking of man to men, founded churches, made
endowments, regulations; everywhere in the civilized world there is a Pulpit, environed with all manner of complex
dignified appurtenances and furtherances, that therefrom a man with the tongue may, to best advantage, address his
fellow-men. They felt that this was the most important thing; that without this there was no good thing. It is a right pious
work, that of theirs; beautiful to behold! But now with the art of Writing, with the art of Printing, a total change has come
over that business. The Writer of a Book, is not he a Preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or that, but
to all men in all times and places? Surely it is of the last importance that he do his work right, whoever do it wrong; —
that the eye report not falsely, for then all the other members are astray! Well; how he may do his work, whether he do it
right or wrong, or do it at all, is a point which no man in the world has taken the pains to think of. To a certain
shopkeeper, trying to get some money for his books, if lucky, he is of some importance; to no other man of any. Whence
he came, whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by what he might be furthered on his course, no one asks. He is
an accident in society. He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as the spiritual light, either the
guidance or the misguidance!

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first form of the
work of a Hero; Books written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the whole Past
Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a
dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined, — they are precious,
great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to
some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still
very literally lives: can be called up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done,
thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of
men.

Do not Books still accomplish miracles, as Runes were fabled to do? They persuade men. Not the wretchedest
circulating-library novel, which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual
practical weddings and households of those foolish girls. So "Celia" felt, so "Clifford" acted: the foolish Theorem of Life,
stamped into those young brains, comes out as a solid Practice one day. Consider whether any Rune in the wildest
imagination of Mythologist ever did such wonders as, on the actual firm Earth, some Books have done! What built St.
Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart of the matter, it was that divine Hebrew BOOK, — the word partly of the man Moses,
an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds, four thousand years ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai! It is the strangest of
things, yet nothing is truer. With the art of Writing, of which Printing is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively
insignificant corollary, the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced. It related, with a wondrous new contiguity
and perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with the Present in time and place; all times and all places with this our
actual Here and Now. All things were altered for men; all modes of important work of men: teaching, preaching,
governing, and all else.

To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a notable, respectable product of the modern ages. Their existence too
is modified, to the very basis of it, by the existence of Books. Universities arose while there were yet no Books
procurable; while a man, for a single Book, had to give an estate of land. That, in those circumstances, when a man had
some knowledge to communicate, he should do it by gathering the learners round him, face to face, was a necessity for
him. If you wanted to know what Abelard knew, you must go and listen to Abelard. Thousands, as many as thirty
thousand, went to hear Abelard and that metaphysical theology of his. And now for any other teacher who had also
something of his own to teach, there was a great convenience opened: so many thousands eager to learn were already
assembled yonder; of all places the best place for him was that. For any third teacher it was better still; and grew ever the
better, the more teachers there came. It only needed now that the King took notice of this new phenomenon; combined or
agglomerated the various schools into one school; gave it edifices, privileges, encouragements, and named it Universitas,
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or School of all Sciences: the University of Paris, in its essential characters, was there. The model of all subsequent
Universities; which down even to these days, for six centuries now, have gone on to found themselves. Such, I conceive,
was the origin of Universities.

It is clear, however, that with this simple circumstance, facility of getting Books, the whole conditions of the business
from top to bottom were changed. Once invent Printing, you metamorphosed all Universities, or superseded them! The
Teacher needed not now to gather men personally round him, that he might speak to them what he knew: print it in a
Book, and all learners far and wide, for a trifle, had it each at his own fireside, much more effectually to learn it! —
Doubtless there is still peculiar virtue in Speech; even writers of Books may still, in some circumstances, find it
convenient to speak also, — witness our present meeting here! There is, one would say, and must ever remain while man
has a tongue, a distinct province for Speech as well as for Writing and Printing. In regard to all things this must remain;
to Universities among others. But the limits of the two have nowhere yet been pointed out, ascertained; much less put in
practice: the University which would completely take in that great new fact, of the existence of Printed Books, and stand
on a clear footing for the Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth, has not yet come into existence. If
we think of it, all that a University, or final highest School can do for us, is still but what the first School began doing, —
teach us to read. We learn to read, in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all
manner of Books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves! It
depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us. The true University of these days is a
Collection of Books.

But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is changed, in its preaching, in its working, by the introduction of Books.
The Church is the working recognized Union of our Priests or Prophets, of those who by wise teaching guide the souls of
men. While there was no Writing, even while there was no Easy-writing, or Printing, the preaching of the voice was the
natural sole method of performing this. But now with Books! — He that can write a true Book, to persuade England, is
not he the Bishop and Archbishop, the Primate of England and of All England? I many a time say, the writers of
Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the real working effective Church of a modern country. Nay not only
our preaching, but even our worship, is not it too accomplished by means of Printed Books? The noble sentiment which a
gifted soul has clothed for us in melodious words, which brings melody into our hearts, — is not this essentially, if we
will understand it, of the nature of worship? There are many, in all countries, who, in this confused time, have no other
method of worship. He who, in any way, shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the fields is beautiful, does he
not show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of all Beauty; as the handwriting, made visible there, of the great Maker of
the Universe? He has sung for us, made us sing with him, a little verse of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How much more
he who sings, who says, or in any way brings home to our heart the noble doings, feelings, darings and endurances of a
brother man! He has verily touched our hearts as with a live coal from the altar. Perhaps there is no worship more
authentic.

Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an "apocalypse of Nature," a revealing of the "open secret." It may well enough be
named, in Fichte's style, a "continuous revelation" of the Godlike in the Terrestrial and Common. The Godlike does ever,
in very truth, endure there; is brought out, now in this dialect, now in that, with various degrees of clearness: all true
gifted Singers and Speakers are, consciously or unconsciously, doing so. The dark stormful indignation of a Byron, so
wayward and perverse, may have touches of it; nay the withered mockery of a French sceptic, — his mockery of the
False, a love and worship of the True. How much more the sphere-harmony of a Shakspeare, of a Goethe; the cathedral
music of a Milton! They are something too, those humble genuine lark-notes of a Burns, — skylark, starting from the
humble furrow, far overhead into the blue depths, and singing to us so genuinely there! For all true singing is of the
nature of worship; as indeed all true working may be said to be, — whereof such singing is but the record, and fit
melodious representation, to us. Fragments of a real "Church Liturgy" and "Body of Homilies," strangely disguised from
the common eye, are to be found weltering in that huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely call Literature! Books
are our Church too.

Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenagemote, old Parliament, was a great thing. The affairs of the nation
were there deliberated and decided; what we were to do as a nation. But does not, though the name Parliament subsists,
the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, out of Parliament
altogether? Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth
Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact, — very
momentous to us in these times. Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say
often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing brings Printing; brings universal
everyday extempore Printing, as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a
power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank
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he has, what revenues or garnitures. the requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and
nothing more is requisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually there. Add
only, that whatsoever power exists will have itself, by and by, organized; working secretly under bandages, obscurations,
obstructions, it will never rest till it get to work free, unencumbered, visible to all. Democracy virtually extant will insist
on becoming palpably extant. —

On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of the things which man can do or make here below, by far the
most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we call Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on
them; — from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew BOOK, what have they not done, what are they not doing! —
For indeed, whatever be the outward form of the thing (bits of paper, as we say, and black ink), is it not verily, at bottom,
the highest act of man's faculty that produces a Book? It is the Thought of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by which
man works all things whatsoever. All that he does, and brings to pass, is the vesture of a Thought. This London City, with
all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what is it but a Thought, but
millions of Thoughts made into One; — a huge immeasurable Spirit of a THOUGHT, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke,
dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man
had to think of the making of that brick. — The thing we called "bits of paper with traces of black ink," is the purest
embodiment a Thought of man can have. No wonder it is, in all ways, the activest and noblest.

All this, of the importance and supreme importance of the Man of Letters in modern Society, and how the Press is to such
a degree superseding the Pulpit, the Senate, the Senatus Academicus and much else, has been admitted for a good while;
and recognized often enough, in late times, with a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. It seems to me, the
Sentimental by and by will have to give place to the Practical. If Men of Letters are so incalculably influential, actually
performing such work for us from age to age, and even from day to day, then I think we may conclude that Men of
Letters will not always wander like unrecognized unregulated Ishmaelites among us! Whatsoever thing, as I said above,
has virtual unnoticed power will cast off its wrappages, bandages, and step forth one day with palpably articulated,
universally visible power. That one man wear the clothes, and take the wages, of a function which is done by quite
another: there can be no profit in this; this is not right, it is wrong. And yet, alas, the making of it right, — what a
business, for long times to come! Sure enough, this that we call Organization of the Literary Guild is still a great way off,
encumbered with all manner of complexities. If you asked me what were the best possible organization for the Men of
Letters in modern society; the arrangement of furtherance and regulation, grounded the most accurately on the actual
facts of their position and of the world's position, — I should beg to say that the problem far exceeded my faculty! It is
not one man's faculty; it is that of many successive men turned earnestly upon it, that will bring out even an approximate
solution. What the best arrangement were, none of us could say. But if you ask, Which is the worst? I answer: This which
we now have, that Chaos should sit umpire in it; this is the worst. To the best, or any good one, there is yet a long way.

One remark I must not omit, That royal or parliamentary grants of money are by no means the chief thing wanted! To
give our Men of Letters stipends, endowments and all furtherance of cash, will do little towards the business. On the
whole, one is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is no evil to
be poor; that there ought to be Literary Men poor, — to show whether they are genuine or not! Mendicant Orders, bodies
of good men doomed to beg, were instituted in the Christian Church; a most natural and even necessary development of
the spirit of Christianity. It was itself founded on Poverty, on Sorrow, Contradiction, Crucifixion, every species of
worldly Distress and Degradation. We may say, that he who has not known those things, and learned from them the
priceless lessons they have to teach, has missed a good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and go barefoot, in coarse
woollen cloak with a rope round your loins, and be despised of all the world, was no beautiful business; — nor an
honorable one in any eye, till the nobleness of those who did so had made it honored of some!

Begging is not in our course at the present time: but for the rest of it, who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the better
for being poor? It is needful for him, at all rates, to know that outward profit, that success of any kind is not the goal he
has to aim at. Pride, vanity, ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, are bred in his heart, as in every heart; need, above all, to
be cast out of his heart, — to be, with whatever pangs, torn out of it, cast forth from it, as a thing worthless. Byron, born
rich and noble, made out even less than Burns, poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that same "best possible
organization" as yet far off, Poverty may still enter as an important element? What if our Men of Letters, men setting up
to be Spiritual Heroes, were still then, as they now are, a kind of "involuntary monastic order;" bound still to this same
ugly Poverty, — till they had tried what was in it too, till they had learned to make it too do for them! Money, in truth,
can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there; and even spurn it back, when it
wishes to get farther.

Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season for them, the fit assigner of them, all settled, — how is the
Burns to be recognized that merits these? He must pass through the ordeal, and prove himself. This ordeal; this wild
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welter of a chaos which is called Literary Life: this too is a kind of ordeal! There is clear truth in the idea that a struggle
from the lower classes of society, towards the upper regions and rewards of society, must ever continue. Strong men are
born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than there. The manifold, inextricably complex, universal struggle of these
constitutes, and must constitute, what is called the progress of society. For Men of Letters, as for all other sorts of men.
How to regulate that struggle? There is the whole question. To leave it as it is, at the mercy of blind Chance; a whirl of
distracted atoms, one cancelling the other; one of the thousand arriving saved, nine hundred and ninety-nine lost by the
way; your royal Johnson languishing inactive in garrets, or harnessed to the yoke of Printer Cave; your Burns dying
broken-hearted as a Gauger; your Rousseau driven into mad exasperation, kindling French Revolutions by his paradoxes:
this, as we said, is clearly enough the worst regulation. The best, alas, is far from us!

And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming; advancing on us, as yet hidden in the bosom of centuries: this is a
prophecy one can risk. For so soon as men get to discern the importance of a thing, they do infallibly set about arranging
it, facilitating, forwarding it; and rest not till, in some approximate degree, they have accomplished that. I say, of all
Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes at present extant in the world, there is no class comparable for importance
to that Priesthood of the Writers of Books. This is a fact which he who runs may read, — and draw inferences from.
"Literature will take care of itself," answered Mr. Pitt, when applied to for some help for Burns. "Yes," adds Mr. Southey,
"it will take care of itself; and of you too, if you do not look to it!"

The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momentous one; they are but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction of the
great body; they can struggle on, and live or else die, as they have been wont. But it deeply concerns the whole society,
whether it will set its light on high places, to walk thereby; or trample it under foot, and scatter it in all ways of wild
waste (not without conflagration), as heretofore! Light is the one thing wanted for the world. Put wisdom in the head of
the world, the world will fight its battle victoriously, and be the best world man can make it. I called this anomaly of a
disorganic Literary Class the heart of all other anomalies, at once product and parent; some good arrangement for that
would be as the punctum saliens of a new vitality and just arrangement for all. Already, in some European countries, in
France, in Prussia, one traces some beginnings of an arrangement for the Literary Class; indicating the gradual possibility
of such. I believe that it is possible; that it will have to be possible.

By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese is one on which we cannot arrive at clearness, but which excites
endless curiosity even in the dim state: this namely, that they do attempt to make their Men of Letters their Governors! It
would be rash to say, one understood how this was done, or with what degree of success it was done. All such things
must be very unsuccessful; yet a small degree of success is precious; the very attempt how precious! There does seem to
be, all over China, a more or less active search everywhere to discover the men of talent that grow up in the young
generation. Schools there are for every one: a foolish sort of training, yet still a sort. The youths who distinguish
themselves in the lower school are promoted into favorable stations in the higher, that they may still more distinguish
themselves, — forward and forward: it appears to be out of these that the Official Persons, and incipient Governors, are
taken. These are they whom they try first, whether they can govern or not. And surely with the best hope: for they are the
men that have already shown intellect. Try them: they have not governed or administered as yet; perhaps they cannot; but
there is no doubt they have some Understanding, — without which no man can! Neither is Understanding a tool, as we
are too apt to figure; "it is a hand which can handle any tool." Try these men: they are of all others the best worth trying.
— Surely there is no kind of government, constitution, revolution, social apparatus or arrangement, that I know of in this
world, so promising to one's scientific curiosity as this. The man of intellect at the top of affairs: this is the aim of all
constitutions and revolutions, if they have any aim. For the man of true intellect, as I assert and believe always, is the
noble-hearted man withal, the true, just, humane and valiant man. Get him for governor, all is got; fail to get him, though
you had Constitutions plentiful as blackberries, and a Parliament in every village, there is nothing yet got! —

These things look strange, truly; and are not such as we commonly speculate upon. But we are fallen into strange times;
these things will require to be speculated upon; to be rendered practicable, to be in some way put in practice. These, and
many others. On all hands of us, there is the announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire of Routine has ended;
that to say a thing has long been, is no reason for its continuing to be. The things which have been are fallen into decay,
are fallen into incompetence; large masses of mankind, in every society of our Europe, are no longer capable of living at
all by the things which have been. When millions of men can no longer by their utmost exertion gain food for
themselves, and "the third man for thirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate potatoes," the things which have been
must decidedly prepare to alter themselves! — I will now quit this of the organization of Men of Letters.

The decorated initial 'A'las, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary Heroes of ours was not the want of
organization for Men of Letters, but a far deeper one; out of which, indeed, this and so many other evils for the Literary
Man, and for all men, had, as from their fountain, taken rise. That our Hero as Man of Letters had to travel without
highway, companionless, through an inorganic chaos, — and to leave his own life and faculty lying there, as a partial
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contribution towards pushing some highway through it: this, had not his faculty itself been so perverted and paralyzed, he
might have put up with, might have considered to be but the common lot of Heroes. His fatal misery was the spiritual
paralysis, so we may name it, of the Age in which his life lay; whereby his life too, do what he might, was half
paralyzed! The Eighteenth was a Sceptical Century; in which little word there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries.
Scepticism means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis.
Perhaps, in few centuries that one could specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism more difficult for a man.
That was not an age of Faith, — an age of Heroes! The very possibility of Heroism had been, as it were, formally
abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever.
The "age of miracles" had been, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any longer. An effete world; wherein Wonder,
Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell; — in one word, a godless world!

How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time, — compared not with the Christian Shakspeares and
Miltons, but with the old Pagan Skalds, with any species of believing men! The living TREE Igdrasil, with the melodious
prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs, deep-rooted as Hela, has died out into the clanking of a World-MACHINE.
"Tree" and "Machine:" contrast these two things. I, for my share, declare the world to be no machine! I say that it does
not go by wheel-and-pinion "motives" self-interests, checks, balances; that there is something far other in it than the
clank of spinning-jennies, and parliamentary majorities; and, on the whole, that it is not a machine at all! — The old
Norse Heathen had a truer motion of God's-world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: the old Heathen Norse were sincere
men. But for these poor Sceptics there was no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and hearsay was called truth. Truth, for most
men, meant plausibility; to be measured by the number of votes you could get. They had lost any notion that sincerity
was possible, or of what sincerity was. How many Plausibilities asking, with unaffected surprise and the air of offended
virtue, What! am not I sincere? Spiritual Paralysis, I say, nothing left but a Mechanical life, was the characteristic of that
century. For the common man, unless happily he stood below his century and belonged to another prior one, it was
impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; he lay buried, unconscious, under these baleful influences. To the strongest man,
only with infinite struggle and confusion was it possible to work himself half loose; and lead as it were, in an enchanted,
most tragical way, a spiritual death-in-life, and be a Half-Hero!

Scepticism is the name we give to all this; as the chief symptom, as the chief origin of all this. Concerning which so
much were to be said! It would take many Discourses, not a small fraction of one Discourse, to state what one feels about
that Eighteenth Century and its ways. As indeed this, and the like of this, which we now call Scepticism, is precisely the
black malady and life-foe, against which all teaching and discoursing since man's life began has directed itself: the battle
of Belief against Unbelief is the never-ending battle! Neither is it in the way of crimination that one would wish to speak.
Scepticism, for that century, we must consider as the decay of old ways of believing, the preparation afar off for new
better and wider ways, — an inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it; we will lament their hard fate. We will
understand that destruction of old forms is not destruction of everlasting substances; that Scepticism, as sorrowful and
hateful as we see it, is not an end but a beginning.

The other day speaking, without prior purpose that way, of Bentham's theory of man and man's life, I chanced to call it a
more beggarly one than Mahomet's. I am bound to say, now when it is once uttered, that such is my deliberate opinion.
Not that one would mean offence against the man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him. Bentham
himself, and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparatively worthy of praise. It is a determinate being what all
the world, in a cowardly half-and-half manner, was tending to be. Let us have the crisis; we shall either have death or the
cure. I call this gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith. It was a laying-down of cant; a saying
to oneself: "Well then, this world is a dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish Hunger; let us see what, by
checking and balancing, and good adjustment of tooth and pinion, can be made of it!" Benthamism has something
complete, manful, in such fearless committal of itself to what it finds true; you may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with
its eyes put out! It is the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, of what lay in the half-and-half state, pervading man's
whole existence in that Eighteenth Century. It seems to me, all deniers of Godhood, and all lip-believers of it, are bound
to be Benthamites, if they have courage and honesty. Benthamism is an eyeless Heroism: the Human Species, like a
hapless blinded Samson grinding in the Philistine Mill, clasps convulsively the pillars of its Mill; brings huge ruin down,
but ultimately deliverance withal. Of Bentham I meant to say no harm.

But this I do say, and would wish all men to know and lay to heart, that he who discerns nothing but Mechanism in the
Universe has in the fatalest way missed the secret of the Universe altogether. That all Godhood should vanish out of
men's conception of this Universe seems to me precisely the most brutal error, — I will not disparage Heathenism by
calling it a Heathen error, — that men could fall into. It is not true; it is false at the very heart of it. A man who thinks so
will think wrong about all things in the world; this original sin will vitiate all other conclusions he can form. One might
call it the most lamentable of Delusions, — not forgetting Witchcraft itself! Witchcraft worshipped at least a living Devil;
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but this worships a dead iron Devil; no God, not even a Devil! Whatsoever is noble, divine, inspired, drops thereby out of
life. There remains everywhere in life a despicable caput-mortuum; the mechanical hull, all soul fled out of it. How can a
man act heroically? The "Doctrine of Motives" will teach him that it is, under more or less disguise, nothing but a
wretched love of Pleasure, fear of Pain; that Hunger, of applause, of cash, of whatsoever victual it may be, is the ultimate
fact of man's life. Atheism, in brief; — which does indeed frightfully punish itself. The man, I say, is become spiritually a
paralytic man; this godlike Universe a dead mechanical steam-engine, all working by motives, checks, balances, and I
know not what; wherein, as in the detestable belly of some Phalaris'-Bull of his own contriving, he the poor Phalaris sits
miserably dying!

Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man's mind. It is a mysterious indescribable process, that of getting to believe; —
indescribable, as all vital acts are. We have our mind given us, not that it may cavil and argue, but that it may see into
something, give us clear belief and understanding about something, whereon we are then to proceed to act. Doubt, truly,
is not itself a crime. Certainly we do not rush out, clutch up the first thing we find, and straightway believe that! All
manner of doubt, inquiry, [Gr.] skepsis as it is named, about all manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable mind. It is
the mystic working of the mind, on the object it is getting to know and believe. Belief comes out of all this, above
ground, like the tree from its hidden roots. But now if, even on common things, we require that a man keep his doubts
silent, and not babble of them till they in some measure become affirmations or denials; how much more in regard to the
highest things, impossible to speak of in words at all! That a man parade his doubt, and get to imagine that debating and
logic (which means at best only the manner of telling us your thought, your belief or disbelief, about a thing) is the
triumph and true work of what intellect he has: alas, this is as if you should overturn the tree, and instead of green
boughs, leaves and fruits, show us ugly taloned roots turned up into the air, — and no growth, only death and misery
going on!

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A
man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he
can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower
than that he will not get. We call those ages in which he gets so low the mournfulest, sickest and meanest of all ages. The
world's heart is palsied, sick: how can any limb of it be whole? Genuine Acting ceases in all departments of the world's
work; dexterous Similitude of Acting begins. The world's wages are pocketed, the world's work is not done. Heroes have
gone out; Quacks have come in. Accordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world, which also was a time of
scepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth? Consider them, with their
tumid sentimental vaporing about virtue, benevolence, — the wretched Quack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them!
Few men were without quackery; they had got to consider it a necessary ingredient and amalgam for truth. Chatham, our
brave Chatham himself, comes down to the House, all wrapt and bandaged; he "has crawled out in great bodily
suffering," and so on; — forgets, says Walpole, that he is acting the sick man; in the fire of debate, snatches his arm from
the sling, and oratorically swings and brandishes it! Chatham himself lives the strangest mimetic life, half-hero, half-
quack, all along. For indeed the world is full of dupes; and you have to gain the world's suffrage! How the duties of the
world will be done in that case, what quantities of error, which means failure, which means sorrow and misery, to some
and to many, will gradually accumulate in all provinces of the world's business, we need not compute.

It seems to me, you lay your finger here on the heart of the world's maladies, when you call it a Sceptical World. An
insincere world; a godless untruth of a world! It is out of this, as I consider, that the whole tribe of social pestilences,
French Revolutions, Chartisms, and what not, have derived their being, — their chief necessity to be. This must alter. Till
this alter, nothing can beneficially alter. My one hope of the world, my inexpugnable consolation in looking at the
miseries of the world, is that this is altering. Here and there one does now find a man who knows, as of old, that this
world is a Truth, and no Plausibility and Falsity; that he himself is alive, not dead or paralytic; and that the world is alive,
instinct with Godhood, beautiful and awful, even as in the beginning of days! One man once knowing this, many men, all
men, must by and by come to know it. It lies there clear, for whosoever will take the spectacles off his eyes and honestly
look, to know! For such a man the Unbelieving Century, with its unblessed Products, is already past; a new century is
already come. The old unblessed Products and Performances, as solid as they look, are Phantasms, preparing speedily to
vanish. To this and the other noisy, very great-looking Simulacrum with the whole world huzzaing at its heels, he can
say, composedly stepping aside: Thou art not true; thou art not extant, only semblant; go thy way! — Yes, hollow
Formulism, gross Benthamism, and other unheroic atheistic Insincerity is visibly and even rapidly declining. An
unbelieving Eighteenth Century is but an exception, — such as now and then occurs. I prophesy that the world will once
more become sincere; a believing world; with many Heroes in it, a heroic world! It will then be a victorious world; never
till then.
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Or indeed what of the world and its victories? Men speak too much about the world. Each one of us here, let the world go
how it will, and be victorious or not victorious, has he not a Life of his own to lead? One Life; a little gleam of Time
between two Eternities; no second chance to us forevermore! It were well for us to live not as fools and simulacra, but as
wise and realities. The world's being saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. We should look to
ourselves: there is great merit here in the "duty of staying at home"! And, on the whole, to say truth, I never heard of
"world's" being "saved" in any other way. That mania of saving worlds is itself a piece of the Eighteenth Century with its
windy sentimentalism. Let us not follow it too far. For the saving of the world I will trust confidently to the Maker of the
world; and look a little to my own saving, which I am more competent to! — In brief, for the world's sake, and for our
own, we will rejoice greatly that Scepticism, Insincerity, Mechanical Atheism, with all their poison-dews, are going, and
as good as gone. —

Now it was under such conditions, in those times of Johnson, that our Men of Letters had to live. Times in which there
was properly no truth in life. Old truths had fallen nigh dumb; the new lay yet hidden, not trying to speak. That Man's
Life here below was a Sincerity and Fact, and would forever continue such, no new intimation, in that dusk of the world,
had yet dawned. No intimation; not even any French Revolution, — which we define to be a Truth once more, though a
Truth clad in hell-fire! How different was the Luther's pilgrimage, with its assured goal, from the Johnson's, girt with
mere traditions, suppositions, grown now incredible, unintelligible! Mahomet's Formulas were of "wood waxed and
oiled," and could be burnt out of one's way: poor Johnson's were far more difficult to burn. — The strong man will ever
find work, which means difficulty, pain, to the full measure of his strength. But to make out a victory, in those
circumstances of our poor Hero as Man of Letters, was perhaps more difficult than in any. Not obstruction,
disorganization, Bookseller Osborne and Fourpence-halfpenny a day; not this alone; but the light of his own soul was
taken from him. No landmark on the Earth; and, alas, what is that to having no loadstar in the Heaven! We need not
wonder that none of those Three men rose to victory. That they fought truly is the highest praise. With a mournful
sympathy we will contemplate, if not three living victorious Heroes, as I said, the Tombs of three fallen Heroes! They fell
for us too; making a way for us. There are the mountains which they hurled abroad in their confused War of the Giants;
under which, their strength and life spent, they now lie buried.

I have already written of these three Literary Heroes, expressly or incidentally; what I suppose is known to most of you;
what need not be spoken or written a second time. They concern us here as the singular Prophets of that singular age; for
such they virtually were; and the aspect they and their world exhibit, under this point of view, might lead us into
reflections enough! I call them, all three, Genuine Men more or less; faithfully, for most part unconsciously, struggling to
be genuine, and plant themselves on the everlasting truth of things. This to a degree that eminently distinguishes them
from the poor artificial mass of their contemporaries; and renders them worthy to be considered as Speakers, in some
measure, of the everlasting truth, as Prophets in that age of theirs. By Nature herself a noble necessity was laid on them to
be so. They were men of such magnitude that they could not live on unrealities, — clouds, froth and all inanity gave way
under them: there was no footing for them but on firm earth; no rest or regular motion for them, if they got not footing
there. To a certain extent, they were Sons of Nature once more in an age of Artifice; once more, Original Men.

As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by nature, one of our great English souls. A strong and noble man;
so much left undeveloped in him to the last: in a kindlier element what might he not have been, — Poet, Priest, sovereign
Ruler! On the whole, a man must not complain of his "element," of his "time," or the like; it is thriftless work doing so.
His time is bad: well then, he is there to make it better! — Johnson's youth was poor, isolated, hopeless, very miserable.
Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in any the favorablest outward circumstances, Johnson's life could have been other
than a painful one. The world might have had more of profitable work out of him, or less; but his effort against the
world's work could never have been a light one. Nature, in return for his nobleness, had said to him, Live in an element of
diseased sorrow. Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the nobleness were intimately and even inseparably connected with each
other. At all events, poor Johnson had to go about girt with continual hypochondria, physical and spiritual pain. Like a
Hercules with the burning Nessus'-shirt on him, which shoots in on him dull incurable misery: the Nessus'-shirt not to be
stript off, which is his own natural skin! In this manner he had to live. Figure him there, with his scrofulous diseases,
with his great greedy heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking mournful as a stranger in this Earth; eagerly
devouring what spiritual thing he could come at: school-languages and other merely grammatical stuff, if there were
nothing better! The largest soul that was in all England; and provision made for it of "fourpence-halfpenny a day." Yet a
giant invincible soul; a true man's. One remembers always that story of the shoes at Oxford: the rough, seamy-faced,
rawboned College Servitor stalking about, in winter-season, with his shoes worn out; how the charitable Gentleman
Commoner secretly places a new pair at his door; and the rawboned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with his
dim eyes, with what thoughts, — pitches them out of window! Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will; but not
beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery
and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness withal. It is a type of the man's life, this pitching away of the shoes. An
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original man; — not a second-hand, borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes
as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on that; — on the reality and substance which Nature
gives us, not on the semblance, on the thing she has given another than us! —

And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally
submissive to what was really higher than he? Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them;
only small mean souls are otherwise. I could not find a better proof of what I said the other day, That the sincere man was
by nature the obedient man; that only in a World of Heroes was there loyal Obedience to the Heroic. The essence of
originality is not that it be new: Johnson believed altogether in the old; he found the old opinions credible for him, fit for
him; and in a right heroic manner lived under them. He is well worth study in regard to that. For we are to say that
Johnson was far other than a mere man of words and formulas; he was a man of truths and facts. He stood by the old
formulas; the happier was it for him that he could so stand: but in all formulas that he could stand by, there needed to be a
most genuine substance. Very curious how, in that poor Paper-age, so barren, artificial, thick-quilted with Pedantries,
Hearsays, the great Fact of this Universe glared in, forever wonderful, indubitable, unspeakable, divine-infernal, upon
this man too! How he harmonized his Formulas with it, how he managed at all under such circumstances: that is a thing
worth seeing. A thing "to be looked at with reverence, with pity, with awe." That Church of St. Clement Danes, where
Johnson still worshipped in the era of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place.

It was in virtue of his sincerity, of his speaking still in some sort from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificial
dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet. Are not all dialects "artificial"? Artificial things are not all false; — nay every true
Product of Nature will infallibly shape itself; we may say all artificial things are, at the starting of them, true. What we
call "Formulas" are not in their origin bad; they are indispensably good. Formula is method, habitude; found wherever
man is found. Formulas fashion themselves as Paths do, as beaten Highways, leading toward some sacred or high object,
whither many men are bent. Consider it. One man, full of heartfelt earnest impulse, finds out a way of doing somewhat,
— were it of uttering his soul's reverence for the Highest, were it but of fitly saluting his fellow-man. An inventor was
needed to do that, a poet; he has articulated the dim-struggling thought that dwelt in his own and many hearts. This is his
way of doing that; these are his footsteps, the beginning of a "Path." And now see: the second men travels naturally in the
footsteps of his foregoer, it is the easiest method. In the footsteps of his foregoer; yet with improvements, with changes
where such seem good; at all events with enlargements, the Path ever widening itself as more travel it; — till at last there
is a broad Highway whereon the whole world may travel and drive. While there remains a City or Shrine, or any Reality
to drive to, at the farther end, the Highway shall be right welcome! When the City is gone, we will forsake the Highway.
In this manner all Institutions, Practices, Regulated Things in the world have come into existence, and gone out of
existence. Formulas all begin by being full of substance; you may call them the skin, the articulation into shape, into
limbs and skin, of a substance that is already there: they had not been there otherwise. Idols, as we said, are not idolatrous
till they become doubtful, empty for the worshipper's heart. Much as we talk against Formulas, I hope no one of us is
ignorant withal of the high significance of true Formulas; that they were, and will ever be, the indispensablest furniture of
our habitation in this world. —

Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his "sincerity." He has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere, — of his
being particularly anything! A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or "scholar" as he calls himself, trying hard to get
some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live — without stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in him. He
does not "engrave Truth on his watch-seal;" no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives by it. Thus it ever is.
Think of it once more. The man whom Nature has appointed to do great things is, first of all, furnished with that
openness to Nature which renders him incapable of being insincere! To his large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature is a
Fact: all hearsay is hearsay; the unspeakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, let him acknowledge it or not, nay even
though he seem to forget it or deny it, is ever present to him, — fearful and wonderful, on this hand and on that. He has a
basis of sincerity; unrecognized, because never questioned or capable of question. Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell,
Napoleon: all the Great Men I ever heard of have this as the primary material of them. Innumerable commonplace men
are debating, are talking everywhere their commonplace doctrines, which they have learned by logic, by rote, at second-
hand: to that kind of man all this is still nothing. He must have truth; truth which he feels to be true. How shall he stand
otherwise? His whole soul, at all moments, in all ways, tells him that there is no standing. He is under the noble necessity
of being true. Johnson's way of thinking about this world is not mine, any more than Mahomet's was: but I recognize the
everlasting element of heart-sincerity in both; and see with pleasure how neither of them remains ineffectual. Neither of
them is as chaff sown; in both of them is something which the seedfield will grow.

Johnson was a Prophet to his people; preached a Gospel to them, — as all like him always do. The highest Gospel he
preached we may describe as a kind of Moral Prudence: "in a world where much is to be done, and little is to be known,"
see how you will do it! A thing well worth preaching. "A world where much is to be done, and little is to be known:" do
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not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of Doubt, of wretched god-forgetting Unbelief; — you were
miserable then, powerless, mad: how could you do or work at all? Such Gospel Johnson preached and taught; — coupled,
theoretically and practically, with this other great Gospel, "Clear your mind of Cant!" Have no trade with Cant: stand on
the cold mud in the frosty weather, but let it be in your own real torn shoes: "that will be better for you," as Mahomet
says! I call this, I call these two things joined together, a great Gospel, the greatest perhaps that was possible at that time.

Johnson's Writings, which once had such currency and celebrity, are now as it were disowned by the young generation. It
is not wonderful; Johnson's opinions are fast becoming obsolete: but his style of thinking and of living, we may hope,
will never become obsolete. I find in Johnson's Books the indisputablest traces of a great intellect and great heart; — ever
welcome, under what obstructions and perversions soever. They are sincere words, those of his; he means things by
them. A wondrous buckram style, — the best he could get to then; a measured grandiloquence, stepping or rather stalking
along in a very solemn way, grown obsolete now; sometimes a tumid size of phraseology not in proportion to the
contents of it: all this you will put up with. For the phraseology, tumid or not, has always something within it. So many
beautiful styles and books, with nothing in them; — a man is a malefactor to the world who writes such! They are the
avoidable kind! — Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine
man. Looking to its clearness of definition, its general solidity, honesty, insight and successful method, it may be called
the best of all Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great solid square-built
edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder did it.

One word, in spite of our haste, must be granted to poor Bozzy. He passes for a mean, inflated, gluttonous creature; and
was so in many senses. Yet the fact of his reverence for Johnson will ever remain noteworthy. The foolish conceited
Scotch Laird, the most conceited man of his time, approaching in such awe-struck attitude the great dusty irascible
Pedagogue in his mean garret there: it is a genuine reverence for Excellence; a worship for Heroes, at a time when neither
Heroes nor worship were surmised to exist. Heroes, it would seem, exist always, and a certain worship of them! We will
also take the liberty to deny altogether that of the witty Frenchman, that no man is a Hero to his valet-de-chambre. Or if
so, it is not the Hero's blame, but the Valet's: that his soul, namely, is a mean valet-soul! He expects his Hero to advance
in royal stage-trappings, with measured step, trains borne behind him, trumpets sounding before him. It should stand
rather, No man can be a Grand- Monarque to his valet-de-chambre. Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king-gear, and there
is left nothing but a poor forked radish with a head fantastically carved; — admirable to no valet. The Valet does not
know a Hero when he sees him! Alas, no: it requires a kind of Hero to do that; — and one of the world's wants, in this as
in other senses, is for most part want of such.

On the whole, shall we not say, that Boswell's admiration was well bestowed; that he could have found no soul in all
England so worthy of bending down before? Shall we not say, of this great mournful Johnson too, that he guided his
difficult confused existence wisely; led it well, like a right valiant man? That waste chaos of Authorship by trade; that
waste chaos of Scepticism in religion and politics, in life-theory and life-practice; in his poverty, in his dust and dimness,
with the sick body and the rusty coat: he made it do for him, like a brave man. Not wholly without a loadstar in the
Eternal; he had still a loadstar, as the brave all need to have: with his eye set on that, he would change his course for
nothing in these confused vortices of the lower sea of Time. "To the Spirit of Lies, bearing death and hunger, he would in
nowise strike his flag." Brave old Samuel: ultimus Romanorum!

decorated initial 'Of Rousseau and his Heroism I cannot say so much. He is not what I call a strong man. A morbid,
excitable, spasmodic man; at best, intense rather than strong. He had not "the talent of Silence," an invaluable talent;
which few Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort in these times, excel in! The suffering man ought really "to consume his
own smoke;" there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, — which, in the metaphorical sense too,
all smoke is capable of becoming! Rousseau has not depth or width, not calm force for difficulty; the first characteristic
of true greatness. A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes
convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he
is the strong man. We need forever, especially in these loud-shrieking days, to remind ourselves of that. A man who
cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no right man.

Poor Rousseau's face is to me expressive of him. A high but narrow contracted intensity in it: bony brows; deep, strait-set
eyes, in which there is something bewildered-looking, — bewildered, peering with lynx-eagerness. A face full of misery,
even ignoble misery, and also of the antagonism against that; something mean, plebeian there, redeemed only by
intensity: the face of what is called a Fanatic, — a sadly contracted Hero! We name him here because, with all his
drawbacks, and they are many, he has the first and chief characteristic of a Hero: he is heartily in earnest. In earnest, if
ever man was; as none of these French Philosophers were. Nay, one would say, of an earnestness too great for his
otherwise sensitive, rather feeble nature; and which indeed in the end drove him into the strangest incoherences, almost
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delirations. There had come, at last, to be a kind of madness in him: his Ideas possessed him like demons; hurried him so
about, drove him over steep places! —

The fault and misery of Rousseau was what we easily name by a single word, Egoism; which is indeed the source and
summary of all faults and miseries whatsoever. He had not perfected himself into victory over mere Desire; a mean
Hunger, in many sorts, was still the motive principle of him. I am afraid he was a very vain man; hungry for the praises
of men. You remember Genlis's experience of him. She took Jean Jacques to the Theatre; he bargaining for a strict
incognito, — "He would not be seen there for the world!" The curtain did happen nevertheless to be drawn aside: the Pit
recognized Jean Jacques, but took no great notice of him! He expressed the bitterest indignation; gloomed all evening,
spake no other than surly words. The glib Countess remained entirely convinced that his anger was not at being seen, but
at not being applauded when seen. How the whole nature of the man is poisoned; nothing but suspicion, self-isolation,
fierce moody ways! He could not live with anybody. A man of some rank from the country, who visited him often, and
used to sit with him, expressing all reverence and affection for him, comes one day; finds Jean Jacques full of the sourest
unintelligible humor. "Monsieur," said Jean Jacques, with flaming eyes, "I know why you come here. You come to see
what a poor life I lead; how little is in my poor pot that is boiling there. Well, look into the pot! There is half a pound of
meat, one carrot and three onions; that is all: go and tell the whole world that, if you like, Monsieur!" — A man of this
sort was far gone. The whole world got itself supplied with anecdotes, for light laughter, for a certain theatrical interest,
from these perversions and contortions of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, to him they were not laughing or theatrical; too real to
him! The contortions of a dying gladiator: the crowded amphitheatre looks on with entertainment; but the gladiator is in
agonies and dying.

And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate appeals to Mothers, with his contrat-social, with his celebrations of
Nature, even of savage life in Nature, did once more touch upon Reality, struggle towards Reality; was doing the
function of a Prophet to his Time. As he could, and as the Time could! Strangely through all that defacement, degradation
and almost madness, there is in the inmost heart of poor Rousseau a spark of real heavenly fire. Once more, out of the
element of that withered mocking Philosophism, Scepticism and Persiflage, there has arisen in this man the ineradicable
feeling and knowledge that this Life of ours is true: not a Scepticism, Theorem, or Persiflage, but a Fact, an awful
Reality. Nature had made that revelation to him; had ordered him to speak it out. He got it spoken out; if not well and
clearly, then ill and dimly, — as clearly as he could. Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, even those stealings
of ribbons, aimless confused miseries and vagabondisms, if we will interpret them kindly, but the blinkard dazzlement
and staggerings to and fro of a man sent on an errand he is too weak for, by a path he cannot yet find? Men are led by
strange ways. One should have tolerance for a man, hope of him; leave him to try yet what he will do. While life lasts,
hope lasts for every man.

Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly celebrated still among his countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like himself,
are what I call unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality in Rousseau. Combined with such an
intellectual gift as his, it makes pictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not genuinely poetical. Not
white sunlight: something operatic; a kind of rose-pink, artificial bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it is universal,
among the French since his time. Madame de Stael has something of it; St. Pierre; and down onwards to the present
astonishing convulsionary "Literature of Desperation," it is everywhere abundant. That same rose-pink is not the right
hue. Look at a Shakspeare, at a Goethe, even at a Walter Scott! He who has once seen into this, has seen the difference of
the True from the Sham-True, and will discriminate them ever afterwards.

We had to observe in Johnson how much good a Prophet, under all disadvantages and disorganizations, can accomplish
for the world. In Rousseau we are called to look rather at the fearful amount of evil which, under such disorganization,
may accompany the good. Historically it is a most pregnant spectacle, that of Rousseau. Banished into Paris garrets, in
the gloomy company of his own Thoughts and Necessities there; driven from post to pillar; fretted, exasperated till the
heart of him went mad, he had grown to feel deeply that the world was not his friend nor the world's law. It was
expedient, if any way possible, that such a man should not have been set in flat hostility with the world. He could be
cooped into garrets, laughed at as a maniac, left to starve like a wild beast in his cage; — but he could not be hindered
from setting the world on fire. The French Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. His semi-delirious speculations
on the miseries of civilized life, the preferability of the savage to the civilized, and such like, helped well to produce a
whole delirium in France generally. True, you may well ask, What could the world, the governors of the world, do with
such a man? Difficult to say what the governors of the world could do with him! What he could do with them is
unhappily clear enough, — guillotine a great many of them! Enough now of Rousseau.

It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbelieving second-hand Eighteenth Century, that of a Hero starting up,
among the artificial pasteboard figures and productions, in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a little well in the rocky
desert places, — like a sudden splendor of Heaven in the artificial Vauxhall! People knew not what to make of it. They
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took it for a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work; alas, it let itself be so taken, though struggling half-blindly, as in bitterness
of death, against that! Perhaps no man had such a false reception from his fellow-men. Once more a very wasteful life-
drama was enacted under the sun.

The tragedy of Burns's life is known to all of you. Surely we may say, if discrepancy between place held and place
merited constitute perverseness of lot for a man, no lot could be more perverse then Burns's. Among those second-hand
acting-figures, mimes for most part, of the Eighteenth Century, once more a giant Original Man; one of those men who
reach down to the perennial Deeps, who take rank with the Heroic among men: and he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut.
The largest soul of all the British lands came among us in the shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant.

His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things; did not succeed in any; was involved in continual difficulties. The
Steward, Factor as the Scotch call him, used to send letters and threatenings, Burns says, "which threw us all into tears."
The brave, hard-toiling, hard-suffering Father, his brave heroine of a wife; and those children, of whom Robert was one!
In this Earth, so wide otherwise, no shelter for them. The letters "threw us all into tears:" figure it. The brave Father, I say
always; — a silent Hero and Poet; without whom the son had never been a speaking one! Burns's Schoolmaster came
afterwards to London, learnt what good society was; but declares that in no meeting of men did he ever enjoy better
discourse than at the hearth of this peasant. And his poor "seven acres of nursery-ground," — not that, nor the miserable
patch of clay-farm, nor anything he tried to get a living by, would prosper with him; he had a sore unequal battle all his
days. But he stood to it valiantly; a wise, faithful, unconquerable man; — swallowing down how many sore sufferings
daily into silence; fighting like an unseen Hero, — nobody publishing newspaper paragraphs about his nobleness; voting
pieces of plate to him! However, he was not lost; nothing is lost. Robert is there the outcome of him, — and indeed of
many generations of such as him.

This Burns appeared under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, born only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it
came to that, in a rustic special dialect, known only to a small province of the country he lived in. Had he written, even
what he did write, in the general language of England, I doubt not he had already become universally recognized as
being, or capable to be, one of our greatest men. That he should have tempted so many to penetrate through the rough
husk of that dialect of his, is proof that there lay something far from common within it. He has gained a certain
recognition, and is continuing to do so over all quarters of our wide Saxon world: wheresoever a Saxon dialect is spoken,
it begins to be understood, by personal inspection of this and the other, that one of the most considerable Saxon men of
the Eighteenth Century was an Ayrshire Peasant named Robert Burns. Yes, I will say, here too was a piece of the right
Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world; — rock, yet with wells of living softness in it! A
wild impetuous whirlwind of passion and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly melody dwelling in the heart of it.
A noble rough genuineness; homely, rustic, honest; true simplicity of strength; with its lightning-fire, with its soft dewy
pity; — like the old Norse Thor, the Peasant-god!

Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, has told me that Robert, in his young days, in spite of their
hardship, was usually the gayest of speech; a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart; far pleasanter to hear
there, stript cutting peats in the bog, or such like, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can well believe it. This basis of
mirth ("fond gaillard," as old Marquis Mirabeau calls it), a primal element of sunshine and joyfulness, coupled with his
other deep and earnest qualities, is one of the most attractive characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells in
him; spite of his tragical history, he is not a mourning man. He shakes his sorrows gallantly aside; bounds forth
victorious over them. It is as the lion shaking "dew-drops from his mane;" as the swift-bounding horse, that laughs at the
shaking of the spear. — But indeed, Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns's, are they not the outcome properly of warm
generous affection, — such as is the beginning of all to every man?

You would think it strange if I called Burns the most gifted British soul we had in all that century of his: and yet I believe
the day is coming when there will be little danger in saying so. His writings, all that he did under such obstructions, are
only a poor fragment of him. Professor Stewart remarked very justly, what indeed is true of all Poets good for much, that
his poetry was not any particular faculty; but the general result of a naturally vigorous original mind expressing itself in
that way. Burns's gifts, expressed in conversation, are the theme of all that ever heard him. All kinds of gifts: from the
gracefulest utterances of courtesy, to the highest fire of passionate speech; loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of affection,
laconic emphasis, clear piercing insight; all was in him. Witty duchesses celebrate him as a man whose speech "led them
off their feet." This is beautiful: but still more beautiful that which Mr. Lockhart has recorded, which I have more than
once alluded to, How the waiters and ostlers at inns would get out of bed, and come crowding to hear this man speak!
Waiters and ostlers: — they too were men, and here was a man! I have heard much about his speech; but one of the best
things I ever heard of it was, last year, from a venerable gentleman long familiar with him. That it was speech
distinguished by always having something in it. "He spoke rather little than much," this old man told me; "sat rather
silent in those early days, as in the company of persons above him; and always when he did speak, it was to throw new
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light on the matter." I know not why any one should ever speak otherwise! — But if we look at his general force of soul,
his healthy robustness every way, the rugged downrightness, penetration, generous valor and manfulness that was in him,
— where shall we readily find a better-gifted man?

Among the great men of the Eighteenth Century, I sometimes feel as if Burns might be found to resemble Mirabeau more
than any other. They differ widely in vesture; yet look at them intrinsically. There is the same burly thick-necked strength
of body as of soul; — built, in both cases, on what the old Marquis calls a fond gaillard. By nature, by course of breeding,
indeed by nation, Mirabeau has much more of bluster; a noisy, forward, unresting man. But the characteristic of
Mirabeau too is veracity and sense, power of true insight, superiority of vision. The thing that he says is worth
remembering. It is a flash of insight into some object or other: so do both these men speak. The same raging passions;
capable too in both of manifesting themselves as the tenderest noble affections. Wit; wild laughter, energy, directness,
sincerity: these were in both. The types of the two men are not dissimilar. Burns too could have governed, debated in
National Assemblies; politicized, as few could. Alas, the courage which had to exhibit itself in capture of smuggling
schooners in the Solway Frith; in keeping silence over so much, where no good speech, but only inarticulate rage was
possible: this might have bellowed forth Ushers de Breze and the like; and made itself visible to all men, in managing of
kingdoms, in ruling of great ever-memorable epochs! But they said to him reprovingly, his Official Superiors said, and
wrote: "You are to work, not think." Of your thinking-faculty, the greatest in this land, we have no need; you are to gauge
beer there; for that only are you wanted. Very notable; — and worth mentioning, though we know what is to be said and
answered! As if Thought, Power of Thinking, were not, at all times, in all places and situations of the world, precisely the
thing that was wanted. The fatal man, is he not always the unthinking man, the man who cannot think and see; but only
grope, and hallucinate, and missee the nature of the thing he works with? He mis-sees it, mistakes it as we say; takes it
for one thing, and it is another thing, — and leaves him standing like a Futility there! He is the fatal man; unutterably
fatal, put in the high places of men. — "Why complain of this?" say some: "Strength is mournfully denied its arena; that
was true from of old." Doubtless; and the worse for the arena, answer I! Complaining profits little; stating of the truth
may profit. That a Europe, with its French Revolution just breaking out, finds no need of a Burns except for gauging
beer, — is a thing I, for one, cannot rejoice at! —

Once more we have to say here, that the chief quality of Burns is the sincerity of him. So in his Poetry, so in his Life. The
song he sings is not of fantasticalities; it is of a thing felt, really there; the prime merit of this, as of all in him, and of his
Life generally, is truth. The Life of Burns is what we may call a great tragic sincerity. A sort of savage sincerity, — not
cruel, far from that; but wild, wrestling naked with the truth of things. In that sense, there is something of the savage in
all great men.

Hero-worship, — Odin, Burns? Well; these Men of Letters too were not without a kind of Hero-worship: but what a
strange condition has that got into now! The waiters and ostlers of Scotch inns, prying about the door, eager to catch any
word that fell from Burns, were doing unconscious reverence to the Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell for worshipper.
Rousseau had worshippers enough; princes calling on him in his mean garret; the great, the beautiful doing reverence to
the poor moon-struck man. For himself a most portentous contradiction; the two ends of his life not to be brought into
harmony. He sits at the tables of grandees; and has to copy music for his own living. He cannot even get his music
copied: "By dint of dining out," says he, "I run the risk of dying by starvation at home." For his worshippers too a most
questionable thing! If doing Hero-worship well or badly be the test of vital well-being or ill-being to a generation, can we
say that these generations are very first-rate? — And yet our heroic Men of Letters do teach, govern, are kings, priests, or
what you like to call them; intrinsically there is no preventing it by any means whatever. The world has to obey him who
thinks and sees in the world. The world can alter the manner of that; can either have it as blessed continuous summer
sunshine, or as unblessed black thunder and tornado, — with unspeakable difference of profit for the world! The manner
of it is very alterable; the matter and fact of it is not alterable by any power under the sky. Light; or, failing that,
lightning: the world can take its choice. Not whether we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, or what we call him; but
whether we believe the word he tells us: there it all lies. If it be a true word, we shall have to believe it; believing it, we
shall have to do it. What name or welcome we give him or it, is a point that concerns ourselves mainly. It, the new Truth,
new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily of the nature of a message from on high; and must and will
have itself obeyed. —

My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's history, — his visit to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if his
demeanor there were the highest proof he gave of what a fund of worth and genuine manhood was in him. If we think of
it, few heavier burdens could be laid on the strength of a man. So sudden; all common Lionism. which ruins innumerable
men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon had been made a King of, not gradually, but at once from the Artillery
Lieutenancy in the Regiment La Fere. Burns, still only in his twenty-seventh year, is no longer even a ploughman; he is
flying to the West Indies to escape disgrace and a jail. This month he is a ruined peasant, his wages seven pounds a year,
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and these gone from him: next month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing down jewelled Duchesses to dinner;
the cynosure of all eyes! Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a
hundred that will stand adversity. I admire much the way in which Burns met all this. Perhaps no man one could point
out, was ever so sorely tried, and so little forgot himself. Tranquil, unastonished; not abashed, not inflated, neither
awkwardness nor affectation: he feels that he there is the man Robert Burns; that the "rank is but the guinea-stamp;" that
the celebrity is but the candle-light, which will show what man, not in the least make him a better or other man! Alas, it
may readily, unless he look to it, make him a worse man; a wretched inflated wind-bag, — inflated till he burst, and
become a dead lion; for whom, as some one has said, "there is no resurrection of the body;" worse than a living dog! —
Burns is admirable here.

And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion-hunters were the ruin and death of Burns. It was they that
rendered it impossible for him to live! They gathered round him in his Farm; hindered his industry; no place was remote
enough from them. He could not get his Lionism forgotten, honestly as he was disposed to do so. He falls into
discontents, into miseries, faults; the world getting ever more desolate for him; health, character, peace of mind, all gone;
— solitary enough now. It is tragical to think of! These men came but to see him; it was out of no sympathy with him,
nor no hatred to him. They came to get a little amusement; they got their amusement; — and the Hero's life went for it!

Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra there is a kind of "Light-chafers," large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits,
and illuminate the ways with at night. Persons of condition can thus travel with a pleasant radiance, which they much
admire. Great honor to the Fire-flies! But —!

Aldous Huxley
Tragedy and the Whole Truth

There were six of them, the best and bravest of the hero’s companions. Turning back from his post in the bows, Odysseus
was in time to see them lifted, struggling, into the air, to hear their screams, the desperate repetition of his own name. The
survivors could only look on helplessly, while Scylla “at the mouth of her cave devoured them, still screaming, still
stretching out their hands to me in the frightful struggle.” And Odysseus adds that it was the most dreadful and
lamentable sight he ever saw in all his “explorings of the passes of the sea.” We can believe it; Homer’s brief description
(the too poetical simile is a later interpolation) convinces us.

Later, the danger passed, Odysseus and his men went ashore for the night and, on the Sicilian beach, prepared their
supper—prepared it, says Homer, ‘expertly.’ The Twelfth Book of the Odyssey concludes with these words. “When they
had satisfied their thirst and hunger, they thought of their dear companions and wept, and in the midst of their tears sleep
came gently upon them.”

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—how rarely the older literatures ever told it! Bits of the truth, yes;
every good book gives us bits of the truth, would not be a good book if it did not. But the whole truth, no. Of the great
writers of the past incredibly few have given us that. Homer—the Homer of the Odyssey—is one of those few.

“Truth?” you question. “For example, 2 + 2 = 4? Or Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837? Or light travels at the
rate of 187,000 miles a second?” No, obviously, you won’t find much of that sort of thing in literature. The ‘truth’ of
which I was speaking just now is in fact no more than an acceptable verisimilitude. When the experiences recorded in a
piece of literature correspond fairly closely with our own actual experiences, or with what I may call our potential
experiences—experiences, that is to say, which we feel (as the result of a more or less explicit process of inference from
known facts) that we might have had—we say, inaccurately no doubt: “This piece of writing is true.” But this, of course,
is not the whole story. The record of a case in a text-book of psychology is scientifically true, insofar as it is an accurate
account of particular events, But it might also strike the reader as being ‘true’ with regard to himself—that is to say,
acceptable, probable, having a correspondence with his own actual or potential experiences. But a text-book of
psychology, is not a work of art—or only secondarily and incidentally a work of art. Mere verisimilitude, mere
correspondence of experience recorded by the writer with experience remembered or imaginable by the reader, is not
enough to make a work of art seem ‘true.’ Good art possesses a kind of super-truth—is more probable, more acceptable,
more convincing than fact itself. Naturally; for the artist is endowed with a sensibility and a power of communication, a
capacity to ‘put things across,’ which events and the majority of people to whom events happen, do not possess.
Experience teaches only the teachable, who are by no means as numerous as Mrs. Micawber’s papa’s favourite proverb
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would lead us to suppose. Artists are eminently teachable and also eminently teachers. They receive from events much
more than most men receive and they can transmit what they have received with a peculiar penetrative force, which
drives their communication deep into the reader’s mind. One of our most ordinary reactions to a good piece of literary art
is expressed in the formula: “This is what I have always felt and thought, but have never been able to put clearly into
words, even for myself.”

II

We are now in a position to explain what we mean when we say that Homer is a writer who tells the Whole Truth. We
mean that the experiences he records correspond fairly closely with our own actual or potential experiences—and
correspond with our experiences not on a single limited sector, but all along the line of our physical and spiritual being.
And we also mean that Homer records these experiences with a penetrative artistic force that makes them seem peculiarly
acceptable and convincing.

So much, then, for truth in literature. Homer’s, I repeat, is the Whole Truth. Consider how almost any other of the great
poets would have concluded the story of Scylla’s attack on the passing ship. Six men, remember, have been taken and
devoured before the eyes of their friends. In any other poem but the Odyssey, what would the survivors have done? They,
would, of course, have wept, even as Homer made them weep. But would they previously have cooked their supper and
cooked it, what’s more, in a masterly fashion? Would they previously have drunk and eaten to satiety? And after
weeping, or actually while weeping, would they have dropped quietly off to sleep? No, they most certainly would not
have done any of these things. They would simply have wept, lamenting their own misfortune and the horrible fate of
their companions, and the Canto would have ended tragically on their tears.

Homer, however, preferred to tell the Whole Truth. He knew that even the most cruelly bereaved must eat; that hunger is
stronger than sorrow and that its satisfaction takes precedence even of tears. He knew that experts continue to act
expertly, and to find satisfaction in their accomplishment, even when friends have just been eaten, even when the
accomplishment is only cooking the supper. He knew that when the belly is full (and only when the belly is full) men can
afford to grieve and that sorrow after supper is almost a luxury. And finally he knew that, even as hunger takes
precedence of grief, so fatigue, supervening, cuts short its career and drowns it in a sleep all the sweeter for bringing
forgetfulness of bereavement. In a word, Homer refused to treat the theme tragically. He preferred to tell the Whole
Truth.

Another author who preferred to tell the Whole Truth was Fielding. “Tom Jones” is one of the very few Odyssean books
written in Europe between the time of Aeschylus and the present age; Odyssean, because never tragical; never—even
when painful and disastrous, even when pathetic and beautiful things are happening. For they do happen; Fielding, like
Homer, admits all the facts, shirks nothing. Indeed, it is precisely because these authors shirk nothing that their books are
not tragical. For among the things they don’t shirk are the irrelevancies which, in actual life, always temper the situations
and characters that writers of tragedy insist on keeping chemically, pure. Consider, for example, the case of Sophy
Western, that most charming, most nearly perfect of young women. Fielding, it is obvious, adored her; (she is said to
have been created in the image of his first, much-loved wife). But in spite of his adoration, he refused to turn her into one
of those chemically pure and, as it were, focussed beings who do and suffer in the world of tragedy. That innkeeper who
lifted the weary Sophia from her horse—what need had he to fall? In no tragedy would he (nay, could he) have collapsed
beneath her weight. For, to begin with, in the tragical context weight is an irrelevance; heroines should be above the law
of gravitation. But that is not all; let the reader now remember what were the results of his fall. Tumbling flat on his back,
he pulled Sophia down on top of him—his belly was a cushion, so that happily she came to no bodily harm—pulled her
down head first. But head first is necessarily legs last; there was a momentary display of the most ravishing charms; the
bumpkins at the inn door grinned or guffawed; poor Sophia, when they picked her up, was blushing in an agony, of
embarrassment and wounded modesty. There is nothing intrinsically improbable about this incident, which is stamped,
indeed, with all the marks of literary truth. But however true, it is an incident which could never, never have happened to
a heroine of tragedy. It would never have been allowed to happen. But Fielding refused to impose the tragedian’s veto; he
shirked nothing—neither the intrusion of irrelevant absurdities into the midst of romance or disaster, nor any of life’s no
less irrelevantly painful interruptions of the course of happiness. He did not want to be a tragedian. And, sure enough,
that brief and pearly gleam of Sophia’s charming posterior was sufficient to scare the Muse of Tragedy out of “Tom
Jones,” just as, more than five and twenty centuries before, the sight of stricken men first eating, then remembering to
weep, then forgetting their tears in slumber had scared her out of the Odyssey.

III

In his “Principles of Literary Criticism” Mr. I. A. Richards affirms that good tragedy is proof against irony and
irrelevance—that it can absorb anything into itself and still remain tragedy. Indeed, he seems to make of this capacity to
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absorb the un-tragical and the anti-tragical a touchstone of tragic merit. Thus tried, practically all Greek, all French, and
most Elizabethan tragedies are found wanting. Only the best of Shakespeare can stand the test. So, at least, says Mr.
Richards. Is he right? I have often had my doubts. The tragedies of Shakespeare are veined, it is true, with irony and an
often terrifying cynicism; but the cynicism is always heroic idealism turned neatly inside out, the irony is a kind of
photographic negative of heroic romance. Turn Troilus’s white into black and all his blacks into white and you have
Thersites. Reversed, Othello and Desdemona become Iago. White Ophelia’s negative is the irony of Hamlet, is the
ingenuous bawdry of her own mad songs; just as the cynicism of mad King Lear is the black shadow-replica of Cordelia.
Now, the shadow, the photographic negative of a thing is in no sense irrelevant to it. Shakespeare’s ironies and cynicisms
serve to deepen his tragic world, but not to widen it. If they had widened it, as the Homeric irrelevancies widened out the
universe of the Odyssey—why, then, the world of Shakespearean tragedy would automatically have ceased to exist. For
example, a scene showing the bereaved Macduff eating his supper, growing melancholy, over the whisky, with thoughts
of his murdered wife and children, and then, with lashes still wet, dropping off to sleep, would be true enough to life; but
it would not be true to tragic art. The introduction of such a scene would change the whole quality of the play; treated in
this Odyssean style, “Macbeth” would cease to be a tragedy. Or take the case of Desdemona. Iago’s bestially cynical
remarks about her character are in no sense, as we have seen, irrelevant to the tragedy. They present us with negative
images of her real nature and of the feelings she has for Othello. These negative images are always hers, are always
recognizably the property of the heroine-victim of a tragedy. Whereas, if, springing ashore at Cyprus, she had tumbled, as
the no less exquisite Sophia was to tumble, and revealed the inadequacies of sixteenth-century underclothing, the play
would no longer be the “Othello” we know. Iago might breed a family of little cynics and the existing dose of bitterness
and savage negation be doubled and trebled; “Othello” would still remain fundamentally “Othello.” But a few
Fieldingesque irrelevancies would destroy it—destroy it, that is to say, as a tragedy; for there would be nothing to prevent
it from becoming a magnificent drama of some other kind. For the fact is that tragedy and what I have called the Whole
Truth are not compatible; where one is, the other is not. There are certain things which even the best, even Shakespearean
tragedy cannot absorb into itself.

To make a tragedy, the artist must isolate a single element out of the totality of human experience and use that
exclusively as his material. Tragedy is something that is separated out from the Whole Truth, distilled from it, so to
speak, as an essence is distilled from the living flower. Tragedy is chemically pure. Hence its power to act quickly and
intensely on our feelings. All chemically pure art has this power to act upon us quickly and intensely. Thus, chemically
pure pornography (on the rare occasions when it happens to be written convincingly, by someone who has the gift of
‘putting things across’) is a quick-acting emotional drug of incomparably greater power than the Whole Truth about
sensuality, or even (for many people) than the tangible and carnal reality itself. It is because of its chemical purity that
tragedy so effectively performs its function of catharsis. It refines and corrects and gives a style to our emotional life, and
does so swiftly, with power. Brought into contact with tragedy, the elements of our being fall, for the moment at any rate,
into an ordered and beautiful pattern, as the iron filings arrange themselves under the influence of the magnet. Through
all its individual variations, this pattern is always fundamentally of the same kind. From the reading or the hearing of a
tragedy we rise with the feeling that

Our friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man’s unconquerable mind;

with the heroic conviction that we too would be unconquerable if subjected to the agonies, that in the midst of the
agonies we too should continue to love, might even learn to exult. It is because it does these things to us that tragedy is
felt to be so valuable. What are the values of Wholly-Truthful art? What does it do to us that seems worth doing? Let us
try to discover.

Wholly-Truthful art overflows the limits of tragedy and shows us, if only by hints and implications, what happened
before the tragic story began, what will happen after it is over, what is happening simultaneously elsewhere (and
‘elsewhere’ includes all those parts of the minds and bodies of the protagonists not immediately engaged in the tragic
struggle). Tragedy is an arbitrarily isolated eddy on the surface of a vast river that flows on majestically, irresistibly,
around, beneath, and to either side of it. Wholly-Truthful art contrives to imply the existence of the entire river as well as
of the eddy. It is quite different from tragedy, even though it may contain, among other constituents, all the elements
from which tragedy is made. (The ‘same thing’ placed in different contexts, loses its identity and becomes, for the
perceiving mind, a succession of different things.) In Wholly-Truthful art the agonies may be just as real, love and the
unconquerable mind just as admirable, just as important, as in tragedy. Thus, Scylla’s victims suffer as painfully as the
monster-devoured Hippolytus in “Phèdre”; the mental anguish of Tom Jones when he thinks he has lost his Sophia, and
lost her by, his own fault, is hardly less than that of Othello after Desdemona’s murder. (The fact that Fielding’s power of
‘putting things across’ is by no means equal to Shakespeare’s, is, of course, merely an accident.) But the agonies and
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indomitabilities are placed by the Wholly-Truthful writer in another, wider context, with the result that they cease to be
the same as the intrinsically identical agonies and indomitabilities of tragedy. Consequently, Wholly-Truthful art
produces in us an effect quite different from that produced by tragedy. Our mood, when we have read a Wholly-Truthful
book is never one of heroic exultation; it is one of resignation, of acceptance. (Acceptance can also be heroic.) Being
chemically impure, Wholly-Truthful literature cannot move us as quickly and intensely as tragedy or any other kind of
chemically pure art. But I believe that its effects are more lasting. The exultations that follow the reading or hearing of a
tragedy are in the nature of temporary inebriations. Our being cannot long hold the pattern imposed by tragedy. Remove
the magnet and the filings tend to fall back into confusion. But the pattern of acceptance and resignation imposed upon us
by Wholly-Truthful literature, though perhaps less unexpectedly beautiful in design, is (for that very reason perhaps)
more stable. The catharsis of tragedy is violent and apocalyptic; but the milder catharsis of Wholly-Truthful literature is
lasting.

IV

In recent times literature has become more and more acutely conscious of the Whole Truth—of the great oceans of
irrelevant things, events, and thoughts stretching endlessly away in every direction from whatever island point (a
character, a story) the author may, choose to contemplate. To impose the kind of arbitrary limitations which must be
imposed by anyone who wants to write a tragedy has become more and more difficult—is now indeed, for those who are
at all sensitive to contemporaneity, almost impossible. This does not mean, of course, that the modern writer must
confine himself to a merely naturalistic manner. One can imply the existence of the Whole Truth without laboriously
cataloguing every object within sight. A book can be written in terms of pure phantasy and yet, by implication, tell the
Whole Truth. Of all the important works of contemporary literature not one is a tragedy. There is no contemporary writer
of significance who does not prefer to state or imply, the Whole Truth. However different one from another in style, in
ethical, philosophical, and artistic intentions, in the scales of values accepted, contemporary writers have this in common,
that they are interested in the Whole Truth. Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Andre Gide, Kafka, Hemingway—here are five
obviously significant and important contemporary writers. Five authors as remarkably unlike one another as they could
well be. They, are as one only in this: that none of them has written a pure tragedy, that all are concerned with the Whole
Truth.

I have sometimes wondered whether tragedy, as a form of art, may not be doomed. But the fact that we are still
profoundly moved by the tragic masterpieces of the past—that we can be moved, against our better judgment, even by
the bad tragedies of the contemporary stage and film—makes me think that the day of chemically pure art is not over.
Tragedy happens to be passing through a period of eclipse, because all the significant writers of our age are too busy
exploring the newly discovered, or re-discovered, world of the Whole Truth to be able to pay any attention to it. But there
is no good reason to believe that this state of things will last for ever. Tragedy is too valuable to be allowed to die. And
there is no reason, after all, why the two kinds of literature—the Chemically Impure and the Chemically Pure, the
literature of the Whole Truth and the literature of Partial Truth—should not exist simultaneously, each in its separate
sphere. The human spirit has need of both.