For

and morality that the accomplishment of the most atrocious guilt invests the perpetrator with impunity, and renders his person for ever sacred and inviolable? madmen and enthusiasts what avail your moral criterions? But as to your Neapolitan bravos, if the act of Brutus who

In pity to the general wrong of Rome,
Slew his best lover for the good of Rome,

authorized by the laws of his country, in manifest opposition to all selfish interests, in the face of the senate, and instantly presenting himself and his cause first to that senate, and then to the assembled commons, by them to stand acquitted or condemned-if such an act as this, with all its vast outjutting circumstances of distinction, can be confounded by any mind, not frantic, with the crime of a cowardly skulking assassin who hires out his dagger for a few crowns to gratify a hatred not his own, or even with the deed of that man who makes a compromise between his revenge and his cowardice, and stabs in the dark the enemy whom he dared not meet in the open field, or summon before the laws of his country— what actions can be so different, that they may not be equally confounded? The ambushed soldier must not fire his musquet, lest his example should be quoted by the villain who, to make sure of his booty, discharges his piece at the unsuspicious passenger from behind a hedge. The physician must not administer a solution of arsenic to the leprous, lest his example should be quoted by professional poisoners. If no distinction full and satisfactory to the conscience and common sense of mankind be afforded by the detestation and horror excited in all men, (even in the meanest and most vicious, if they are not wholly monsters) by the act of the assassin, contrasted with the fervent admiration felt by the good and wise in

all ages when they mention the name of Brutus: contrasted with the fact that the honour or disrespect with which that name was spoken of, became an historic criterion of a noble or a base age; and if it is in vain that our own hearts answer to the question of the poet—

Is there among the adamantine spheres,
Wheeling unshaken through the boundless void,
Aught that with half such majesty can fill
The human bosom, as when Brutus rose
Refulgent from the stroke of Caesar's fate
Amid the crowd of patriots; and his arm
Aloft extending, like eternal Jove,

When guilt brings down the thunder, call'd aloud
On Tully's name, and shook his crimson sword,
And bade the father of his country, hail!
For lo! the tyrant prostrate on the dust
And Rome again is free!

If, I say, all this be fallacious and insufficient, can we have any firmer reliance on a cold ideal calculation of imaginary general consequences, which, if they were general, could not be consequences at all: for they would be effects of the frenzy or frenzied wickedness, which alone could confound actions so utterly dissimilar? No! (would the ennobled descendant of our Russells or Sidneys conclude.) No! calumnious bigot! never yet did a human being become an assassin from his own or the general admiration of the hero Brutus; but I dare not warrant, that villains might not be encouraged in their trade of secret murder, by finding their own guilt attributed to the Roman patriot, and might not conclude,

* Akenside. Pleasures of the Imagination, 2nd ed. B. II. p. 361. -Ed.

and shook the crimson sword
Of justice in his rapt, astonish'd eye,
And bade," &c.

So in the original. S. C.

that if Brutus be no better than an assassin, an assassin can be no worse than Brutus.

I request that the preceding be not interpreted as my own judgment on tyrannicide. I think with Machiavel and with Spinosa, for many and weighty reasons assigned by those philosophers, that it is difficult to conceive a case, in which a good man would attempt tyrannicide, because it is difficult to conceive one, in which a wise man would recommend it. In a small state, included within the walls of a single city, and where the tyranny is maintained by foreign guards, it may be otherwise; but in a nation or empire it is perhaps inconceivable, that the circumstances which made a tyranny possible, should not likewise render the removal of the tyrant useless. The patriot's sword may cut off the Hydra's head; but he possesses no brand to stanch the active corruption of the body, which is sure to re-produce a

successor.

I must now in a few words answer the objection to the former part of my argument (for to that part only the objection applies,) namely, that the doctrine of general consequences was stated as the criterion of the action, not of the agent. I might answer, that the author himself had in some measure justified me in not noticing this distinction by holding forth the probability, that the Supreme Judge will proceed by the same rule. The agent may then safely be included in the action, if both here and hereafter the action only and its general consequences will be attended to. But my main ground of justification is, that the distinction itself is merely logical, not real and vital. The character of the agent is determined by his view of the action: and that system of morality is alone true and suited to human nature, which unites the intention and the motive, the warmth and the

light, in one and the same act of mind. This alone is worthy to be called a moral principle. Such a principle may be extracted, though not without difficulty and danger, from the ore of the Stoic philosophy; but it is to be found unalloyed and entire in the Christian system, and is there called faith.*

* It may, perhaps, be not uninteresting to insert in this place a note which Mr. Coleridge wrote in his own copy of The Friend :—

"This last paragraph falls off from all the preceding. The reasoning is just, but it is dimly stated, -not brought out, nor urged to the point. Want of space was the original cause of this deficiency. The Friend appearing on stamped sheets, and the author having reached the sixteenth page in the treatment of the moral question, he was forced to compress the promised answer to the objection into the remainder of a single page; and in the attempt slurred it over.' 22nd June, 1829. --Ed.

ESSAY XVI.

THE following address was delivered at Bristol, in the month of February, 1795. The only omissions regard the names of persons; and I insert it here in support of the assertion made by me, in the beginning of Essay II. of this volume,* and because this very address has been referred to in an infamous libel in proof of my former Jacobinism. Different as my present convictions are on the subject of philosophical necessity, I have for this reason left the last paragraph unaltered.†

Αεὶ γὰρ τῆς ἐλευθερίας ἐφίεμαι· πόλλα δὲ ἐν καὶ τοῖς φιλελευθέροις μισητὰ, ἀντελεύθερα.

For I am always a lover of liberty; but in those who would appropriate the title, I find too many points destructive of liberty and hateful to her genuine advocates.

Companies resembling the present will, from a variety of circumstances, consist chiefly of the zealous advocates for freedom. It will therefore be our endeavour, not so much to excite the torpid, as to regulate the feelings of the ardent and above all, to evince the necessity of bottoming on fixed principles, that so we may not be the unstable patriots of passion or accident, nor hurried away by names of which we have not sifted the meaning, and

* Essay VI. in the First vol. of this edition, p. 246.

This speech, or lecture, was, with another on the then war with France, published in November, 1795, under the title Conciones ad populum. In this edition the author has made some alterations, but they are confined to the mere style.-Ed.

VOL. II.

C