Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/604

590 gallant bravery and well-grounded contempt of their enemies; as if there were no small number of as great spirits among us as his was who, when Rome was nigh besieged by Hannibal, being in the city, bought that piece of ground at no cheap rate whereon Hannibal himself encamped his own regiment. Next, it is a lively and cheerful presage of a happy success and victory, for, as in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous—not only to vital but to rational faculties, and those in the correctest and the pertest operations of wit and subtlety—it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is; so, when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly up, as that it hath not only wherewith to bestow upon the solidest and the sublimest parts of controversy and new invention, it betokens as not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the old and wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again, entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperous virtue, destined to become great and honourable in these latter ages, Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle, renewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam, purging and unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the tonight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms."

Never did prophet at the distance of two centuries foresee more precisely the object of his vaticination than Milton saw in this passage the relative positions of England freed and the continent enslaved, and wondering at our doings at this moment.

The great prose works of Milton comprise his "History of England " from the earliest times to the Norman Conquest, including all the old legends of the chroniclers, the arrival of Brute from Rome, the story of king Lear, and all those fine old fables which have been the grand storehouses of poets and dramatists. His "Tractate of Education;" his "Areopagitica"—just quoted; his "Tenure of livings and Magistrates;" the "Eikonoklastes;" the "Defensio Populi" and "Defensio Secunda"—vindicating the conduct of England in deposing impracticable kings; his "Treatise on the Best Manner of Removing Hirelings out of the Church;" his essay on "Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Cases;" his "State Letters," written at the command of Cromwell; an "Art of Logic;" a "Treaty of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and what Best Means may be used against the Growth of Popery;" and his "Familiar Letters," in Latin: besides these he left in manuscript a "Brief History of Muscovy," and a "System of Theology,"—both since published. It may be safely said that scarcely any other writer has left such a sound and profound body of knowledge of all that is necessary for the maintenance of freedom, civil and religious, in the state.

Dryden is also a vigorous prose writer; but nothing can be more characteristic of the two men than the prose of Milton and Dryden. The one is grave, solemn, independent, upholding the sacred interests of religion and liberty; the other, that of Dryden—besides short lives of Polybius, Lucian, and Plutarch, and an "Essay on Dramatic Literature," consists chiefly of a mass of his dramas, and other poems—couched in the most extravagant and unmanly terms of flattery. It is in vain to say that this was the spirit of the time; we have only to turn to Milton and behold that a great soul despised such creeping and licking the shoes of the aristocracy as much then as now.

Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion" and memoirs of his own life assume a permanent importance from the position which he occupied in the struggles of those times; but as literary compositions they are very defective in style, and as historical authority, the very circumstances of the writer as a partisan and a deserter of the side of freedom, make it necessary to read them with caution. Hobbes, the celebrated philosopher of Malmesbury, was one of the most powerful minds of the age, but at the same time one of the most mischievous. By his works, called the "Leviathan," his treatise on "Human Nature," on "Liberty," and "Necessity," and his "Decameron Physiologicum," with others of the like kind, he became the head of the school of deistical if not atheistical writers, which has found such wide acceptance in France, Germany, and even in our own country. The admirers of Hobbes are very zealous in defending him from the charge of being the apostle of infidelity, and acccuse the advocates of Christianity and man's spiritual nature of maligning him; but the bast proof is that the Encyclopéedists of France, the Illuminati and Strausians of Germany, claim him as their groat Goliath, and draw their strongest shafts out of his quiver and those of his disciples, Tindal and Hume. They are the English skeptics, who are, in fact, the fathers of French and German skepticism with all its consequences. Mr. Mill says—"Hobbes is a great name in philosophy, on account both of what he taught, and the extraordinary impulse which he communicated to the spirit of free inquiry in Europe." It is this very influence which is to be deplored, for Hobbes's inquiries had a decided bias to ignore the very highest faculties and qualities of human nature, and his greatest discoveries were to discover nothing. Hobbes is no longer read, but his principles are distilled through a thousand atheistical alembics all over the world. It has been well observed by a modern writer that, "as for what is properly to be called his system of philosophy—and it is to be observed that in his own writings his views in metaphysics, in morals, in politics, are all bound and built up together into one consistent whole—the question of the truth or falsehood of that seems to be completely settled. Nobody now professes more than a partial Hobbism. If so much of the creed of the philosopher of Malmesbury as affirms the non-existence of any essential distinction between right and wrong, the non-existence of conscience or the moral sense, the non-existence of anything beyond mere sensation in either emotion or intelligence, and other similar negatives of his moral and metaphysical doctrine, has still its satisfied disciples, who is now a Hobbist either in politics or mathematics? Yet certainly it is in these latter departments that we must look for the greater part of what is absolutely original in the notions of this teacher. Hobbes's philosophy of human nature is not amiss as a philosophy of Hobbes's own human nature. Without passions or imagination