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are not separate things, but one and indivisible. A man's work is the lamp by which he reads his features. And then he so apportions praise and blame; so sets off the jocose and familiar with a moral solemnity; makes anecdote, and detail of dress, and allusion to personal grace or deformity, subserve, by intricate suggestion, his ultimate purpose, and so presents to us life with eternity for background, that we not only feel that the picture is the actual presentment of the man as he lived-a veritable portrait-we feel also that the writer has worked in no light or careless mood, that the poorest life is serious enough when seen against eternity, and that we ourselves, however seldom we may remember it, are but momentary shadows projected upon it. Carlyle does not write "scoundrel" on one man's forehead, and "angel" on another's: he knows that pure scoundrel and pure angel have their dwellings in other places than earth; he is too cunning an artist to use these mercilessly definite lines. He works by allusion, suggestion, light touches of fancy, spurts of humour, grotesque imaginative exaggerations; and these things so reduce and tone one another down, that the final result is perfectly natural and homogeneous. It is only by some such combination of intellectual forces that you can shadow forth the complexity of life and character. In humanity there is no such thing as a straight line or an unmixed colour. You see the flesh-colour on the cheek of a portrait the artist will tell you that the consummately-natural result was not attained by one wash of paint, but by the mixture and reduplication of a hundred tints, the play of myriad lights and shadows, no one of which is natural in itself, although the blending of the whole is. These Essays are the completest, the most characteristic portraits in our literature. Carlyle is always at home when his subject is man in the

concrete.

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Lord Macaulay also wrote Essays critical and biographical, and has been perhaps more widely popular than his great contemporary; but he is a different kind of thinker and writer altogether. He did not brood over the abysses of being as Carlyle continually does. The sense of time and death did not haunt him as they haunt the other. The world, as it figured itself to Lord Macaulay, was a comparatively commonplace world. He cared for man, but he cared for party quite as much. He recognised men mainly as Whigs and Tories." His idea of the universe was a Parliamentary one. His insight into man was not deep. He painted in positive colours. He is never so antithetical as when describing a character; and character, if properly conceived, sets the measured antitheses of the rhetorician at defiance. It is constantly eluding them. His criticism is good enough so far as it goes, but it does not go far; it deals more with the accidents than with the realities of things. Lord Macaulay, as we have said, lived quite as much for party as for man; and the men who interested him were the men who were historical centres, around whom men and events revolved. He did not, as Carlyle often does, take hold of an individual, and view him against immensity; he takes a man and looks at him in connection with contemporary events. When he writes of Johnson, he is thinking all the while of Goldsmith, and Garrick, and Boswell, and Reynolds; when he writes of Clive and Warren Hastings, he is more anxious to tell the story of their Indian conquests than to enter into the secrets of their spirits. And for this posterity is not likely to blame Lord Macaulay. He knew

his strength. His pictorial faculty is astonishing; neither pomp nor circumstance cumbers it; it moves along like a triumphal procession, which no weight of insignia and banner can oppress. Out of the past

he selects some special drama, which is vivified and held together by the life of a single individual, and that he paints with his most brilliant colours. He is the creator of the Historical Essay, and in that department is not likely soon to have a successor. His unfinished History is only a series of historical pictures pieced together into one imposing panorama, but throughout there is wonderful splendour and pomp of colour. Every figure, too, is finished down to the buttons and the finger nails.

Considered as a literary form, the Essay is comparatively of late growth. The first literary efforts of a people consist of song and narrative. First comes the poet or minstrel, who sings heroic exploits, the strength and courage of heroes. These songs pass from individual to individual, and are valuable, not on account of the amount of historic truth, but of the amount of passion and imagery, they contain. Explode to-morrow into mere myth and dream the incidents of the Iliad, and you do not affect in the slightest degree the literary merit of the poem. Still for all men Achilles shouts in the trenches, Helen is beautiful, the towers of Ilium flame to heaven. Prove that Chevy Chase cannot in any one particular be considered a truthful relation of events, and you do it no special harm. It stirs the blood like a trumpet all the same. After the poet comes the prose narrator of events, who presents his facts peering obscurely through the mists of legend, but who has striven, as far as his ability extends, to tell us the truth. When he appears, the history of a nation has become extensive enough and important enough to awaken curiosity; men are anxious to know how events did actually occur, and what relation one event bears to another. When he appears, the national temper has cooled down-men no longer stand blinded by the splendours of sunrise. The sunrise has melted into the light of common day. The air has become emptied of wonder. The gods have deserted earth, and men only remain. Long after the poet and the historian comes the Essayist. Before the stage is prepared for him, thought must have accumulated to a certain point; a literature less or more must be in existence, and must be preserved in printed books. Songs have been sung, histories and biographies have been written; and to these songs, histories, and biographies he must have access. Then, before he can write, society must have formed itself, for in its complexity and contrasts he finds his food. Before the Essayist can have free play, society must have existed long enough to have become self-conscious, introspective; to have brooded over itself and its perplexities; to have discovered its blots and weak points; to have become critical, and, consequently appreciative of criticism. And as the Essay does not, like the poem, or the early history or narration of events, appeal to the primitive feelings, before it can be read and enjoyed, there must exist a class who have attained wealth and leisure, and a certain acquaintance with the accumulated stores of thought on which the Essayist works, else his allusions are lost, his criticism a dead letter, his satire pointless. All this takes a long time to accomplish, and it is generally late in the literary history of a country before its Essayists appear. Then, the Essay itself has its peculiar literary conditions.

It bears the same

relation to the general body of prose that the lyric bears to the general body of poetry. Like the lyric, it is brief; and, like the lyric, it demands a certain literary finish and perfection. In a long epic, the poet may now and then be allowed to nod; in a history, it is not essential that every sentence should sparkle. But the Essayist, from the very nature of his task, is not permitted to be dull or slovenly. He must be alert, full of intellectual life, concise, polished. He must think clearly, and express himself clearly. His style is as much an element of his success as his thought. The narrow limit in which he works demands this. In a ten-mile race it is not expected that the runners shall go all the way at the top of their speed; in a race of three hundred yards it is not unreasonably expected that they shall do so. Then, besides all this, the Essay must, as a basis or preliminary, be artistically conceived. It is neither a dissertation nor a thesis; properly speaking, it is a work of art, and must conform to artistic rules. It requires not only the intellectual qualities which we have indicated, but unity, wholeness, self-completion. In this it resembles a poem. It must hang together. It must round itself off into a separate literary entity. When finished, it must be able to sustain itself and live. The Essayists of whom we have spoken fulfil these conditions more or less; and the measure of their fulfilment is the measure of success. These writers indicate in what directions the Essay has manifested itself, and they may be roughly arranged in groups and clusters. There are the egotists-the most delightful of all-who choose for subjects themselves, their surroundings, their moods and phantasies, whose charm consists not so much in the value or brilliancy of thought as in revelation of personal character: these are represented by Montaigne and Lamb; the satirists of society, manners, and social phenomena, by Addison and Steele; the fanciful and ornamental Essayists-they who wreathe the human porch with the honeysuckles of poetry-by Hunt, and by Hazlitt to some extent; the critical and biographical Essay, by Carlyle; the historical Essay-the brilliant and many-coloured picture of which some single man's life is the frame-by Lord Macaulay; the moral and didactic Essay, by Bacon in old time, and recently by Sir Henry Taylor and Sir Arthur Helps. Of course, this is but an arrangement in the rough, and will not stand a too critical examination, for several of the writers mentioned belong now to one cluster and now to another. Essaywriting is a craft vigorously prosecuted in England at present; and generally the writers will be found to belong to one or other of the groups which we have indicated.

THE ENGLISH ESSAYISTS.

ESSAYS, CIVIL AND MORAL

[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 sect 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 labour 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 favour: 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

BORN 1561: DIED 1626.]

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 candlelights. 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 dæmonum ;" because it filleth 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 The first sovereign good of human nature. 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 characteristic of all Bacon's writings, and is only to be light upon the face of the matter, or chaos; then

• “His philosophical genius, and the force of his language, gave him a greater advantage even than his learning, while his keen perception of the true and beautiful, and his analytic powers, have made him the marvel,

delight, and despair of succeeding essayists.”—Devey. "Who is there that, upon hearing the name of Lord Bacon, does not instantly recognise everything of genfus the most profound, everything of literature the most extensive, everything of discovery the most penetrating, everything of observation on human life the most distinguished and refined?"-Burke in speech on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings.

"In Bacon's Essays the superiority of his genius

appears to the greatest advantage; the novelty and depth of his reflections often receiving a strong relief from the triteness of the subject. The volume may be read from beginning to end in a few hours, and yet after the twentieth perusal, one seldom fails to remark in it something overlooked before, This, indeed, is a

accounted for by the inexhaustible aliment they furnish to our own thoughts, and the sympathetic activity they impart to our torpid faculties."-Dugald Stewart. ↑ John xviii, 38.

He breathed light into the face of man; and still

* Gen. ii. 7.

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 said, "Pompa mortis magis terret, quam mors ipsa." Groans and convulsions, and a discoloured 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 there

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 before death is no such terrible enemy, when a man 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 honour of man's nature; and that mixture of falsehood 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 as to say, 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,

The celebrated French essayist, and styled the father of essay-writing as we now know it--born 1533; died 1592.

+ Luke xviii. 8.

hath so many attendants about him, that can win
the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over
death; love slights it; honour aspireth to it;
grief flieth to it; fear pre-occupieth 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 Cæsar 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 de-
spatch; "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 vitæ extremum inter munera
ponit naturæ." 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 dolours 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 UNITY IN RELIGION.

Religion being the chief band of human society, it is a happy thing, when itself is well contained within the true band of unity. The quarrels and

In allusion to the song of Simeon, Luke ii. 29.

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