Page:Criticism on the Declaration of independence, as a literary document (IA criticismondecla00seld).pdf/12

 The expression "human events" I submit to the taste of the cultivated reader. Affairs, may be human or inhuman; divine or diabolical. An "event" may be great or small, &c. But can humanity or inhumanity be predicated of "events?" To be sure, human beings are actors frequently, in the scenes which when completed we call "events." Does that fact however, make them human? A pestilence—famine—the rise and fall of empires and wars are events. Does the connection of human affairs with any of these events, make the event human? The error of the writer is however very small; consisting merely in attaching the same idea to the word "events" which a scholar would have attached to affairs.

Events are abstractions; in the mind of the pagan more or less connected with fate: and in the view of the christian with Divine Providence. In either case they are understood to be supra-human. Truth, may be divine; but can it with strict propriety be called human? A human truth would be nearly as inappreciable as a divine lie. Human beings may tell the truth; that does not make the truth human; because it is what exists irrespective of the man or of his veracity. So of events. They are passed, or are transpiring, or foreshadow their coming, and all this irrespective of man. Events, therefore are not human. "To err, is human."

My remarks upon the first paragraph, having been protracted far beyond any expectation or previous design; it may be proper to state here, that I do not meditate a querulous critic upon the whole piece. So far from that, I look upon the Declaration as possessing literary merit of a high order. It is too late to deny it, if one had the disposition. A composition that for seventy years can carry such a burthen of defects as this has, must possess great strength somewhere. I had rather carry the gates of Gaza than such a load. And since it was once discovered, that the great strength of a giant lay in his hair, let no neophite suppose, as a corresponding paradox, that the vigor of the composition under review, lies concealed in the unintelligible generalities at the beginning, or the sounding nonsense at the end. Whoever possesses sufficient acumen to distinguish flourishes of rhetoric from facts, will perceive (as he reads the passages that follow the