The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

'He that should record my idle talk, to the prejudice of the most paltry law, opinion, or custom of his parish, would do himself a great deal of wrong, and me too; for, in what I say, I warrant no other certainty, but 'tis what I had then in my thought, a thought tumultuous and wavering. ["I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet," says the offended king. "These words are not mine." Hamlet: "Nor mine now."] All I say is by way of discourse. I should not speak so boldly, if it were my due to be believed, and so I told a great man, who complained to me of the tartness and contention of my advice.' And, indeed, he would not, in this instance, that is very certain; – for he has been speaking on the subject of RELIGIOUS TOLERATION, and among other remarks, somewhat too far in advance of his time, he has let fall, by chance, such passages as these, which, of course, he stands ready to recall again in case any one is offended. ('These words are not mine, Hamlet.' 'Nor mine now.') 'To kill men, a clear and shining light is required, and our life is too real and essential, to warrant these supernatural and fantastic accidents.' 'After all 'tis setting a man's conjectures at a very high price to cause a man to be roasted alive upon them.' He does not look up at all, after making this accidental remark; for he is too much occupied with a very curious story, which happens to come into his head at that moment, of certain men, who being more profoundly asleep than men usually are, became, according to certain grave authorities, what in their dreams they fancied they were; and having mentioned one case sufficiently ludicrous to remove any unpleasant sensation or inquiry which his preceding allusion might have occasioned, he resumes, 'If dreams can sometimes so incorporate themselves with effects of life, I cannot believe that therefore our will should be accountable to justice. Which I say, as a man, who am neither judge nor privy counsellor, nor think myself, by many degrees, worthy so to be, but a man of the common sort, born and vowed to the obedience of the public realm, both in words and acts.

'Thought is free; —thought is free.' Ariel.

'Perceiving you to be ready and prepared on one part, I propose to you on the other, with all the care I can, to clear your judgment, not to enforce it. Truly, I have not only a great many humours, but also a great many opinions [which I bring forward here, and assume as mine] that I would endeavour to make my son dislike, if I had one. The truest, are not always the most commodious to man; he is of too wild a composition. "We speak of all things by precept and resolution," he continues, returning again to this covert question of toleration, and Lord Bacon complains also that that is the method in his meridian. They make me hate things that are likely, when they impose them on me for infallible. "Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy" – (or, as Lord Bacon expresses it, "wonder is the seed of knowledge") – enquiry the progress – ignorance the end. Ay, but there is a sort of ignorance, strong and generous, that yields nothing in honour and courage to knowledge, a knowledge, which to conceive, requires no less knowledge than knowledge itself.'

'I saw, in my younger days, a report of a process that Corras, a counsellor of Thoulouse, put in print.' – [The vain, egotistical, incoherent, rambling old Frenchman, the old Roman Catholic French gentleman, who is understood to be the author of this new experiment in letters, was not far from being a middle-aged man, when the pamphlet which he here alludes to was first published; but his chronology, generally, does not bear a very close examination. Some very extraordinary anachronisms, which the critics are totally at a loss to account for, have somehow slipped into his story. There was a young philosopher in France in those days, of a most precocious, and subtle, and inventive genius – of a most singularly artistic genius, combining speculation and practice, as they had never been combined before, and already busying himself with all sorts of things, and among other things, with curious researches in regard to ciphers, and other questions not less interesting at that time; – there was a youth in France, whose family name was also English, living there with his eyes wide open, a youth who had found occasion to invent a cipher of his own even then, into whose hands that publication might well have fallen on its first appearance, and one on whose mind it might very naturally have made the impression here recorded. But let us return to the story.] – 'I saw in my younger days, a report of a process, that Corras, a counsellor of Thoulouse, put in print, of a strange accident of two men, who presented themselves the one for the other. I remember, and I hardly remember anything else, that he seemed to have rendered the imposture of him whom he judged to be guilty, so wonderful, and so far exceeding both our knowledge and his who was the judge, that I thought it a very bold sentence that condemned him to be hanged. [That is the point.] Let us take up SOME FORM of ARREST, that shall say, THE COURT understands nothing of the matter, more freely and ingenuously than the Areopagites did, who ordered the parties to appear again in a hundred years.' We must not forget that these stories 'are not regarded by the author merely for the use he makes of them, – that they carry, besides what he applies them to, the seeds of a richer and bolder matter, and sometimes collaterally a more delicate sound, both to the author himself who declines saying anything more about it in that place, and to others who shall happen to be of his ear!' One already prepared by previous discovery of the method of communication here indicated, and by voluminous readings in it, to understand that appeal, begs leave to direct the attention of the critical reader to the delicate collateral sounds in the story last quoted.

It is not irrelevant to notice that this story is introduced to the attention of the reader, 'who will, perhaps, see farther into it than others,' in that chapter on toleration in which it is suggested that considering the fantastic, and unscientific, and unsettled character of the human beliefs and opinions, and that even 'the Fathers' have suggested in their speculations on the nature of human life, that what men believed themselves to be, in their dreams, they really became, it is after all setting a man's conjectures at a very high price to cause a man to be roasted alive on them; the chapter in which it is intimated that considering the natural human liability to error, a little more room for correction of blunders, a little larger chance of arriving at the common truth, a little more chance for growth and advancement in learning, would, perhaps, on the whole, be likely to conduce to the human welfare, instead of sealing up the human advancement for ever, with axe and cord and stake and rack, within the limits of doctrines which may have been, perhaps, the very wisest, the most learned, of which the world was capable, at the time when their form was determined. It is the chapter which he calls fancifully, a chapter 'on cripples,' into which this odd story about the two men who presented themselves, the one for the other, in a manner so remarkable, is introduced, for lameness is always this author's grievance, wherever we find him, and he is driven to all sorts of devices to overcome it; for he is the person who came prepared to speak well, and who hates that sort of speaking, where a man reads his speech, because he is one who could naturally give it a grace by action, or as another has it, he is one who would suit the action to the word.

But it was not the question of 'hanging' only, or 'roasting alive,' that authors had to consider with themselves in these times. For those forms of literary production which an author's literary taste, or his desire to reach and move and mould the people, might incline him to select – the most approved forms of popular literature, were in effect forbidden to men, bent, as these men were, on taking an active part in the affairs of their time. Any extraordinary reputation for excellence in these departments, would hardly have tended to promote the ambitious views of the young aspirant for honors in that school of statesmanship, in which the 'Fairy Queen' had been scornfully dismissed, as 'an old song.' Even that disposition to the gravest and profoundest forms of philosophical speculation, which one foolish young candidate for advancement was indiscreet enough to exhibit prematurely there, was made use of so successfully to his disadvantage, that for years his practical abilities were held in suspicion on that very account, as he complains. The reputation of a Philosopher in those days was quite as much as this legal practitioner was willing to undertake for his part. That of a Poet might have proved still more uncomfortable, and more difficult to sustain. His claim to a place in the management of affairs would not have been advanced by it, in the eyes of those old statesmen, whose favour he had to propitiate. However, he was happily relieved from any suspicion of that sort. If those paraphrases of the Psalms for which he chose to make himself responsible, – if those Hebrew melodies of his did not do the business for him, and clear him effectually of any such suspicion in the eyes of that generation, it is difficult to say what would. But whether his devotional feelings were really of a kind to require any such painful expression as that on their own account, may reasonably be doubted by any one acquainted at all with his general habits of thought and sentiment. These lyrics of the philosopher appear on the whole to prove too much; looked at from a literary point of view merely, they remind one forcibly of the attempts of Mr. Silence at a Bacchanalian song. 'I have a reasonable good ear in music,' says the unfortunate Pyramus, struggling a little with that cerebral development and uncompromising facial angle which he finds imposed on him. 'I have a reasonable good ear in music: let us have the tongs and the bones.'

'A man must frame some probable cause, why he should not do his best, and why he should dissemble his abilities,' says this author, speaking of colour, or the covering of defects; and that the prejudice just referred to was not peculiar to the English court, the remarkable piece of dramatic criticism which we are about to produce from this old Gascon philosopher's pages, may or may not indicate, according as it is interpreted. It serves as an introduction to the passage in which the author's double meaning, and the occasionally double sound of his stories is noted. In the preceding chapter, it should be remarked, however, the author has been discoursing in high strains, upon the vanity of popular applause, or of any applause but that of reason and conscience; sustaining himself with quotations from the Stoics, whose doctrines on this point he assumes as the precepts of a true and natural philosophy; and among others the following passage was quoted: – [Taken from an epistle of Seneca, but including a quotation from a letter of Epicurus, on the same subject.] – 'Remember him who being asked why he took so much pains in an art that could come to the knowledge of but few persons, replied, "A few are enough for me. I have enough with one, I have enough with never a one." He said true; yourself and a companion are theatre enough to one another, or you to yourself. Let us be to you the whole people, and the whole people to you but one. You should do like the beasts of chase who efface the track at the entrance into their den.' But this author's comprehensive design embraces all the oppositions in human nature; he thinks it of very little use to preach to men from the height of these lofty philosophic flights, unless you first dive down to the platform of their actualities, and by beginning with the secret of what they are, make sure that you take them with you. So then the latent human vanity, must needs be confessed, and instead of taking it all to himself this time, poor Cicero and Pliny are dragged up, the latter very unjustly, as the commentator complains, to stand the brunt of this philosophic shooting.

'But this exceeds all meanness of spirit in persons of such quality as they were, to think to derive any glory from babbling and prating, even to the making use of their private letters to their friends, and so withal that though some of them were never sent, the opportunity being lost, they nevertheless published them; with this worthy excuse, that they were unwilling to lose their labour, and have their lucubrations thrown away.' – Was it not well becoming two consuls of Rome, sovereign magistrates of the republic, that commanded the world, to spend their time in patching up elegant missives, in order to gain the reputation of being well versed in their own mother tongue? What could a pitiful schoolmaster have done worse, who got his living by it? If the acts of Xenophon and Caesar had not far transcended their eloquence, I don't believe they would ever have taken the pains to write them. They made it their business to recommend not their saying, but their doing. The companions of Demosthenes in the embassy to Philip, extolling that prince as handsome, eloquent, and a stout drinker, Demosthenes said that those were commendations more proper for a woman, an advocate, or a sponge. 'Tis not his profession to know either how to hunt, or to dance well.

Orabunt causas alii, coelique meatus
Describent radio, et fulgentia sidera dicent,
Hic regere imperio populos sciat.

Plutarch says, moreover, that to appear so excellent in these less necessary qualities, is to produce witness against a man's self, that he has spent his time and study ill, which ought to have been employed in the acquisition of more necessary and more useful things. Thus Philip, King of Macedon, having heard the great Alexander, his son, sing at a feast to the wonder and envy of the best musicians there. 'Art thou not ashamed,' he said to him, 'to sing so well?' And to the same Philip, a musician with whom he was disputing about something concerning his art, said, 'Heaven forbid, sir, that so great a misfortune should ever befall you as to understand these things better than I.' Perhaps this author might have made a similar reply, had his been subjected to a similar criticism. And Lord Bacon quotes this story too, as he does many others, which this author has first selected, and for the same purpose; for, not content with appropriating his philosophy, and pretending to invent his design and his method, he borrows all his most significant stories from him, and brings them in to illustrate the same points, and the points are borrowed also: he makes use, indeed, of his common-place book throughout in the most shameless and unconscionable manner. 'Rack his style, Madam, rack his style?' he said to Queen Elizabeth, as he tells us, when she consulted him – he being then of her counsel learned, in the case of Dr. Hayward, charged with having written 'the book of the deposing of Richard the Second, and the coming in of Henry the Fourth,' and sent to the Tower for that offence. The queen was eager for a different kind of advice. Racking an author's book did not appear to her coarse sensibilities, perfectly unconscious of the delicacy of an author's susceptibilities, a process in itself sufficiently murderous to satisfy her revenge. There must be some flesh and blood in the business before ever she could understand it. She wanted to have 'the question' put to that gentleman as to his meaning in the obscure passages in that work under the most impressive circumstances; and Mr. Bacon, himself an author, being of her counsel learned, was requested to make out a case of treason for her; and wishes from such a source were understood to be commands in those days. Now it happened that one of the managers and actors at the Globe Theatre, who was at that time sustaining, as it would seem, the most extraordinary relations of intimacy and friendship with the friends and patrons of this same person, then figuring as the queen's adviser, had recently composed a tragedy on this very subject; though that gentleman, more cautious than Dr. Hayward, and having, perhaps, some learned counsel also, had taken the precaution to keep back the scene of the deposing of royalty during the life-time of this sharp-witted queen, reserving its publication for the reign of her erudite successor; and the learned counsel in this case being aware of the fact, may have felt some sympathy with this misguided author. 'No, madam,' he replied to her inquiry, thinking to take off her bitterness with a merry conceit, as he says, 'for treason I can not deliver opinion that there is any, but very much felony.' The queen apprehending it gladly, asked, 'How?' and 'wherein?' Mr. Bacon answered, 'Because he had stolen many of his sentences and conceits out of Cornelius Tacitus.' It would do one good to see, perhaps, how many felonious appropriations of sentences, and quotations, and ideas, the application he recommends would bring to light in this case.

But the instances already quoted are not the only ones which this free spoken foreign writer, this Elizabethan genius abroad, ventures to adduce in support of this position of his, that statesmen – men who aspire to the administration of republics or other forms of government – if they cannot consent on that account to relinquish altogether the company of the Muses, must at least so far respect the prevailing opinion on that point, as to be able to sacrifice to it the proudest literary honours. Will the reader be pleased to notice, not merely the extraordinary character of the example in this instance, but the grounds of the assumption which the critic makes with so much coolness.

'And could the perfection of eloquence have added any lustre proportionable to the merit of a great person, certainly Scipio and Laelius had never resigned the honour of their comedies, with all the luxuriancies and delicacies of the Latin tongue, to an African slave, for that the work was THEIRS its beauty and excellency SUFFICIENTLY PROVE.' [This is from a book in which the supposed autograph of Shakspere is found; a work from which he quotes incessantly, and from which he appears, indeed, to have taken the whole hint of his learning.] 'Besides Terence himself confesses as much, and I should take it ill in any one that would dispossess me of that belief.' For, as he says in another place, in a certain deeply disguised dedication which he makes of the work of a friend, a poet, whose early death he greatly lamented, and whom he is 'determined,' as he says, 'to revive and raise again to life if he can:' 'As we often judge of the greater by the less, and as the very pastimes of great men give an honourable idea to the clear-sighted of the source from which they spring, I hope you will, by this work of his, rise to the knowledge of himself, and by consequence love and embrace his memory. In so doing, you will accomplish what he exceedingly longed for whilst he lived.' But here he continues thus, 'I have, indeed, in my time known some, who, by a knack of writing, have got both title and fortune, yet disown their apprenticeship, purposely corrupt their style, and affect ignorance of so vulgar a quality (which also our nation observes, rarely to be seen in very learned hands), carefully seeking a reputation by better qualities.'

I once did hold it, as our statists do, a baseness to write fair: but now it did me yeoman's service.

    – Hamlet.

And it is in the next paragraph to this, that he takes occasion to mention that his stories and allegations do not always serve simply for example, authority, or ornament; that they are not limited in their application to the use he ostensibly makes of them, but that they carry, for those who are in his secret, other meanings, bolder and richer meanings, and sometimes collaterally a more delicate sound. And having interrupted the consideration upon Cicero and Pliny, and their vanity and pitiful desire for honour in future ages, with this criticism on the limited sphere of statesmen in general, and the devices to which Lælius and Scipio were compelled to resort, in order to get their plays published without diminishing the lustre of their personal renown, and having stopped to insert that most extraordinary avowal in regard to his two-fold meanings in his allegations and stories, he returns to the subject of this correspondence again, for there is more in this also than meets the ear; and it is not Pliny, and Cicero only, whose supposed vanity, and regard for posthumous fame, as men of letters, is under consideration. 'But returning to the speaking virtue;' he says, 'I find no great choice between not knowing to speak anything but ill, and not knowing anything but speaking well. The sages tell us, that as to what concerns knowledge there is nothing but philosophy, and as to what concerns effects nothing but virtue, that is generally proper to all degrees and orders. There is something like this in these two other philosophers, for they also promise ETERNITY to the letters they write to their friends, but 'tis after another manner, and by accommodating themselves for a good end to the vanity of another; for they write to them that if the concern of making themselves known to future ages, and the thirst of glory, do yet detain them in the management of public affairs, and make them fear the solitude and retirement to which they would persuade them; let them never trouble themselves more about it, forasmuch as they shall have credit enough with posterity to assure them that, were there nothing else but the letters thus writ to them, those letters will render their names as known and famous as their own public actions themselves could do. [And that —that is the key to the correspondence between two other philosophers enigmatically alluded to here.] And besides this difference,' for it is 'these two other philosophers,' and not Pliny and Cicero, and not Seneca and Epicurus alone, that we talk of here, 'and besides this difference, these are not idle and empty letters, that contain nothing but a fine jingle of well chosen words, and fine couched phrases; but replete and abounding with grave and learned discourses, by which a man may render himself – not more eloquent but more wise, and that instruct us not to speak but to do well'; for that is the rhetorical theory that was adopted by the scholars and statesmen then alive, whose methods of making themselves known to future ages he is indicating, even in these references to the ancients. 'Away with that eloquence which so enchants us with its harmony that we should more study it than things'; for this is the place where the quotation with which our investigation of this theory commenced is inserted in the text, and here it is, in the light of these preceding collections of hints that he puts in the story first quoted, wherein he says, the nature of the orator will be much more manifestly laid open to us, than in that seeming care for his fame, or in that care of his style, for its own sake. It is the story of Eros, the slave, who brought the speaker word that the audience was deferred, when in composing a speech that he was to make in public, 'he found himself straitened in time, to fit his words to his mouth as he had a mind to do.'

CHAPTER III

THE POSSIBILITY OF GREAT ANONYMOUS WORKS, – OR WORKS PUBLISHED UNDER AN ASSUMED NAME, – CONVEYING, UNDER RHETORICAL DISGUISES, THE PRINCIPAL SCIENCES, – RE-SUGGESTED, AND ILLUSTRATED

Is the storm overblown? I hid me under the dead moon-calf's gaberdine for fear of the storm.

     – Tempest.

BUT as to this love of glory which the stoics, whom this philosopher quotes so approvingly, have measured at its true worth; as to this love of literary fame, this hankering after an earthly immortality, which he treats so scornfully in the Roman statesman, let us hear him again in another chapter, and see if we can find any thing whereby his nature and designs will more manifestly be laid open to us. 'Of all the foolish dreams in the world,' he says, that which is most universally received, is the solicitude of reputation and glory, which we are fond of to that degree as to abandon riches, peace, life, and health, which are effectual and substantial good, to pursue this vain phantom. And of all the irrational humours of men, it should seem that the philosophers themselves have the most ado, and do the least disengage themselves from this the most restive and obstinate of all the follies. There is not any one view of which reason does so clearly accuse the vanity, as that; but it is so deeply rooted in us, that I doubt whether any one ever clearly freed himself from it, or no. After you have said all, and believed all that has been said to its prejudice, it creates so intestine an inclination in opposition to your best arguments, that you have little power and firmness to resist it; for (as Cicero says) even those who controvert it, would yet that the books they write should appear before the world with their names in the title page, and seek to derive glory from seeming to despise it. All other things are communicable and fall into commerce; we lend our goods —

[It irks me not that men my garments wear.]

and stake our lives for the necessities and service of our friends; but to communicate one's honour, and to robe another with one's own glory, is very rarely seen. And yet we have some examples of that kind. Catulus Luctatius, in the Cymbrian war, having done all that in him lay to make his flying soldiers face about upon the enemy, ran himself at last away with the rest, and counterfeited the coward, to the end that his men might rather seem to follow their captain, than to fly from the enemy; and after several anecdotes full of that inner significance of which he speaks elsewhere, in which he appears, but only appears, to lose sight of this question of literary honour, for they relate to military conflicts, he ventures to approach, somewhat cautiously and delicately, the latent point of his essay again, by adducing the example of persons, not connected with the military profession, who have found themselves called upon in various ways, and by means of various weapons, to take part in these wars; who have yet, in consequence of certain 'subtleties of conscience,' relinquished the honour of their successes; and though there is no instance adduced of that particular kind of disinterestedness, in which an author relinquishes to another the honour of his title page, as the beginning might have led one to anticipate; on the whole, the not indiligent reader of this author's performances here and elsewhere, will feel that the subject which is announced as the subject of this chapter, 'Not to communicate a man's honour or glory,' has been, considering the circumstance, sufficiently illustrated.

'As women succeeding to peerages had, notwithstanding their sex, the right to assist and give their votes in the causes that appertain to the jurisdiction of peers; so the ecclesiastical peers, notwithstanding their profession, were obliged to assist our kings in their wars, not only with their friends and servants, but in their own persons. And he instances the Bishop of Beauvais, who took a gallant share in the battle of Bouvines, but did not think it fit for him to participate in the fruit and glory of that violent and bloody trade. He, with his own hand, reduced several of the enemy that day to his mercy, whom he delivered to the first gentleman he met, either to kill or to receive them to quarter, referring that part to another hand. As also did William, Earl of Salisbury, to Messire John de Neale, with a like subtlety of conscience to the other, he would KILL, but NOT WOUND him, and for that reason, fought only with a mace. And a certain person in my time, being reproached by the king that he had laid hands on a priest, stiffly and positively denied it. The case was, he had cudgelled and kicked him.' And there the author abruptly, for that time, leaves the matter without any allusion to the case of still another kind of combatants, who, fighting with another kind of weapon, might also, from similar subtleties of conscience, perhaps think fit to devolve on others the glory of their successes.

But in a chapter on names, in which, if he has not told, he has designed to tell all; and what he could not express, he has at least pointed out with his finger, this subject is more fully developed. In this chapter, he regrets that such as write chronicles in Latin do not leave our names as they find them, for in making of Vaudemont VALLE-MONTANUS, and metamorphosing names to dress them out in Greek or Latin, we know not where we are, and with the persons of the men, lose the benefit of the story: but one who tracks the inner thread of this apparently miscellaneous collection of items, need be at no such loss in this case. But at the conclusion of this apparently very trivial talk about names, he resumes his philosophic humour again, and the subsequent discourse on this subject, recalls once more, the considerations with which philosophy sets at nought the loss of fame, and forgets in the warmth that prompts to worthy deeds, the glory that should follow them.

'But this consideration – that is the consideration "that it is the custom in France, to call every man, even a stranger, by the name of any manor or seigneury, he may chance to come in possession of, tends to the total confusion of descents, so that surnames are no security," – "for," he says, "a younger brother of a good family, having a manor left him by his father, by the name of which he has been known and honoured, cannot handsomely leave it; ten years after his decease, it falls into the hand of a stranger, who does the same." Do but judge whereabouts we shall be concerning the knowledge of these men. This consideration leads me therefore into another subject. Let us look a little more narrowly into, and examine upon what foundation we erect this glory and reputation, for which the world is turned topsy-turvy. Wherein do we place this renown, that we hunt after with such infinite anxiety and trouble. It is in the end PIERRE or WILLIAM that bears it, takes it into his possession, and whom only it concerns. Oh what a valiant faculty is HOPE, that in a mortal subject, and in a moment, makes nothing of usurping infinity, immensity, eternity, and of supplying her master's indigence, at her pleasure, with all things that he can imagine or desire. And this Pierre or William, what is it but a sound, when all is done, ("What's in a name?") or three or four dashes with a pen?'

And he has already written two paragraphs to show, that the name of William, at least, is not excepted from the general remarks he is making here on the vanity of names; while that of Pierre is five times repeated, apparently with the same general intention, and another combination of sounds is not wanting which serves with that free translation the author himself takes pains to suggest and defend, to complete what was lacking to that combination, in order to give these remarks their true point and significance, in order to redeem them from that appearance of flatness which is not a characteristic of this author's intentions, and in his style merely serves as an intimation to the reader that there is something worth looking for beneath it.

As to the name of William, and the amount of personal distinction which that confers upon its owners, he begins by telling us, that the name of Guienne is said to be derived from the Williams of our ancient Aquitaine, 'which would seem,' he says, rather far fetched, were there not as crude derivations in Plato himself, to whom he refers in other places for similar precedents; and when he wishes to excuse his enigmatical style – the titles of his chapters for instance. And by way of emphasizing this particular still further, he mentions, that on the occasion when Henry, the Duke of Normandy, the son of Henry the Second, of England, made a feast in France, the concourse of nobility and gentry was so great, that for sport's sake he divided them into troops, according to their names, and in the first troop, which consisted of Williams, there were found a hundred and ten knights sitting at the table of that name, without reckoning the simple gentlemen and servants.

And here he apparently digresses from his subject for the sake of mentioning the Emperor Geta, 'who distributed the several courses of his meats by the first letters of the meats themselves, where those that began with B were served up together; as brawn, beef, beccaficos, and so of the others.' This appears to be a little out of the way; but it is not impossible that there may be an allusion in it to the author's own family name of Eyquem, though that would be rather farfetched, as he says; but then there is Plato at hand, still to keep us in countenance.

But to return to the point of digression. 'And this Pierre, or William, what is it but a sound when all is done? Or three or four dashes with a pen, so easy to be varied, that I would fain know to whom is to be attributed the glory of so many victories, to Guesquin, to Glesquin, or to Gueaguin. And yet there would be something more in the case than in Lucian that Sigma should serve Tau with a process, for "He seeks no mean rewards." The quere is here in good earnest. The point is, which of these letters is to be rewarded for so many sieges, battles, wounds, imprisonment, and services done to the crown of France by this famous constable. Nicholas Denisot never concerned himself further than the letters of his name, of which he has altered the whole contexture, to build up by anagram the Count d'Alsinois whom he has endowed with the glory of his poetry and painting. [A good precedent – but here is a better one.] And the historian Suetonius looked only to the meaning of his; and so, cashiering his fathers surname, Lenis left Tranquillus successor to the reputation of his writings. Who would believe that the Captain Bayard should have no honour but what he derives from the great deeds of Peter (Pierre) Terrail, [the name of Bayard – "the meaning"] and that Antonio Escalin should suffer himself, to his face, to be robbed of the honour of so many navigations, and commands at sea and land, by Captain Poulin and the Baron de la Garde. [The name of Poulin was taken from the place where he was born, De la Garde from a person who took him in his boyhood into his service.] Who hinders my groom from calling himself Pompey the Great? But, after all, what virtue, what springs are there that convey to my deceased groom, or the other Pompey (who had his head cut off in Egypt), this glorious renown, and these so much honoured flourishes of the pen?' Instructive suggestions, especially when taken in connection with the preceding items contained in this chapter, apparently so casually introduced, yet all with a stedfast bearing on this question of names, and all pointing by means of a thread of delicate sounds, and not less delicate suggestions, to another instance, in which the possibility of circumstances tending to countervail the so natural desire to appropriate to the name derived from one's ancestors, the lustre of one's deeds, is clearly demonstrated.

''Tis with good reason that men decry the hypocrisy that is in war; for what is more easy to an old soldier than to shift in time of danger, and to counterfeit bravely, when he has no more heart than a chicken. There are so many ways to avoid hazarding a man's own person' – 'and had we the use of the Platonic ring, which renders those invisible that wear it, if turned inwards towards the palm of the hand, it is to be feared that a great many would often hide themselves, when they ought to appear.' 'It seems that to be known, is in some sort to a man's life and its duration in another's keeping. I for my part, hold that I am wholly in myself, and that other life of mine which lies in the knowledge of my friends, considering it nakedly and simply in itself, I know very well that I am sensible of no fruit or enjoyment of it but by the vanity of a fantastic opinion; and, when I shall be dead, I shall be much less sensible of it, and shall withal absolutely lose the use of those real advantages that sometimes accidentally follow it. [That was Lord Bacon's view, too, exactly.] I shall have no more handle whereby to take hold of reputation, or whereby it may take hold of me: for to expect that my name should receive it, in the first place, I have no name that is enough my own. Of two that I have, one is common to all my race, and even to others also: there is one family at Paris, and another at Montpelier, whose surname is Montaigne; another in Brittany, and Xaintonge called De la Montaigne. The transposition of one syllable only is enough to ravel our affairs, so that I shall peradventure share in their glory, and they shall partake of my shame; and, moreover, my ancestors were formerly surnamed Eyquem, a name wherein a family well known in England at this day is concerned. As to my other name, any one can take it that will, and so, perhaps, I may honour a porter in my own stead. And, besides, though I had a particular distinction myself, what can it distinguish when I am no more. Can it point out and favour inanity?

But will thy manes such a gift bestow
As to make violets from thy ashes grow?

'But of this I have spoken elsewhere.' He has – and to purpose.

But as to the authority for these readings, Lord Bacon himself will give us that; for this is the style which he discriminates so sharply as 'the enigmatical,' a style which he, too, finds to have been in use among the ancients, and which he tells us has some affinity with that new method of making over knowledge from the mind of the teacher to that of the pupil, which he terms the method of progression– (which is the method of essaie) – in opposition to the received method, the only method he finds in use, which he, too, calls the magisterial. And this method of progression, with which the enigmatical has some affinity, is to be used, he tells us, in cases where knowledge is delivered as a thread to be spun on, where science is to be removed from one mind to another to grow from the root, and not delivered as trees for the use of the carpenter, where the root is of no consequence. In this case, he tells us it is necessary for the teacher to descend to the foundations of knowledge and consent, and so to transplant it into another as it grew in his own mind, 'whereas as knowledge is now delivered, there is a kind of contract of error between the deliverer and the receiver, for he that delivereth knowledge desireth to deliver it in such a form as may best be believed, and not as may best be examined: and he that receiveth knowledge desireth rather present satisfaction than expectant inquiry, and so rather not to doubt than not to err, glory making the author not to lay open his weakness, and sloth making the disciple not to know his strength.' Now, so very grave a defect as this, in the method of the delivery and tradition of Learning, would of course be one of the first things that would require to be remedied in any plan in which 'the Advancement' of it was seriously contemplated. And this method of the delivery and tradition of knowledge which transfers the root with them, that they may grow in the mind of the learner, is the method which this philosopher professes to find wanting, and the one which he seems disposed to invent. He has made a very thorough survey of the stores of the ancients, and is not unacquainted with the more recent history of learning; he knows exactly what kinds of methods have been made use of by the learned in all ages, for the purpose of putting themselves into some tolerable and possible relations with the physical majority; he knows what devices they have always been compelled to resort to, for the purpose of establishing some more or less effective communication between themselves and that world to which they instinctively seek to transfer their doctrine. But this method, which he suggests here as the essential condition of the growth and advancement of learning, he does not find invented. He refers to a method which he calls the enigmatical, which has an affinity with it, 'used in some cases by the discretion of the ancients,' but disgraced since, 'by the impostures of persons, who have made it as a false light for their counterfeit merchandises.' The purpose of this latter style is, as he defines it, 'to remove the secrets of knowledge from the penetration of the more vulgar capacities, and to reserve them to selected auditors, or to wits of such sharpness as can pierce the veil.' And that is a method, he tells us, which philosophy can by no means dispense with in his time, and 'whoever would let in new light upon the human understanding must still have recourse to it.' But the method of delivery and tradition in those ancient schools, appears to have been too much of the dictatorial kind to suit this proposer of advancement; its tendency was to arrest knowledge instead of promoting its growth. He is not pleased with the ambition of those old masters, and thinks they aimed too much at a personal impression, and that they sometimes undertook to impose their own particular and often very partial grasp of those universal doctrines and principles, which are and must be true for all men, in too dogmatical and magisterial a manner, without making sufficient allowance for the growth of the mind of the world, the difference of races, etc.

But if any doubt in regard to the use of the method described, in the composition of the work now first produced as AN EXAMPLE of the use of it, should still remain in any mind; or if this method of unravelling it should seem too studious, perhaps the author's own word for it in one more quotation may be thought worth taking.

'I can give no account of my life by MY ACTIONS, fortune has placed them too low; I must do it BY MY FANCIES. And when shall I have done representing the continual agitation and change of my thoughts as they come into my head, seeing that Diomedes filled six thousand books upon the subject of grammar.' [The commentators undertake to set him right here, but the philosopher only glances in his intention at the voluminousness of the science of words, in opposition to the science of things, which he came to establish.] 'What must prating produce, since prating itself, and the first beginning to speak, stuffed the world with such a horrible load of volumes. So many words about words only. They accused one Galba, of old, of living idly; he made answer that every one ought to give account of his actions, but not of his leisure. He was mistaken, for justice– [the civil authority] – has cognizance and jurisdiction over those that do nothing, or only PLAY at WORKING… Scribbling appears to be the sign of a disordered age. Every man applies himself negligently to the duty of his vocation at such a time and debauches in it.' From that central wrong of an evil government, an infectious depravity spreads and corrupts all particulars. Everything turns from its true and natural course. Thus scribbling is the sign of a disordered age. Men write in such times instead of acting; and scribble, or seem to perhaps, instead of writing openly to purpose.

And yet, again, that central, and so divergent, wrong is the result of each man's particular contribution, as he goes on to assert. 'The corruption of this age is made up by the particular contributions of every individual man,' —

He were no lion, were not Romans hinds. —Cassius.

'Some contribute treachery, others injustice, irreligion, tyranny, avarice and cruelty, according as they have power; the WEAKER SORT CONTRIBUTE FOLLY, VANITY, and IDLENESS, and of these I am one.'

Caesar loves no plays as thou dost, Antony. Such men are dangerous.

Or, as the same poet expresses it in another Roman play: —

This double worship,
Where one part does disdain with cause, the other 
Insult without all reason; where gentry, title, wisdom
Cannot conclude but by the yea and no
Of general ignorance, – it must omit
Real necessities – and give way the while
To unstable slightness; purpose so barred,
It follows, nothing is done to purpose.

And that is made the plea for an attempt to overthrow the popular power, and to replace it with a government containing the true head of the state, its nobility, its learning, its gentleness, its wisdom.

But the essayist continues: – 'It seems as if it were the season for vain things when the hurtful oppress us; in a time when doing ill is common, to do nothing but what signifies nothing is a kind of commendation. 'Tis my comfort that I shall be one of the last that shall be called in question, – for it would be against reason to punish the less troublesome while we are infested with the greater. As the physician said to one who presented him his finger to dress, and who, as he perceived, had an ulcer in his lungs, "Friend, it is not now time to concern yourself about your finger's ends." And yet I saw some years ago, a person, whose name and memory I have in very great esteem, in the very height of our great disorders, when there was neither law nor justice put in execution, nor magistrate that performed his office, —no more than there is now, – publish I know not what pitiful reformations about clothes, cookery and law chicanery. These are amusements wherewith to feed a people that are ill used, to show that they are not totally forgotten. These others do the same, who insist upon stoutly defending the forms of speaking, dances and games to a people totally abandoned to all sorts of execrable vices – it is for the Spartans only to fall to combing and curling themselves, when they are just upon the point of running headlong into some extreme danger of their lives.

'For my part, I have yet a worse custom. I scorn to mend myself by halves. If my shoe go awry, I let my shirt and my cloak do so too: when I am out of order I feed on mischief. I abandon myself through despair, and let myself go towards the precipice, and as the saying is, throw the helve after the hatchet.' We should not need, perhaps, the aid of the explanations already quoted, to show us that the author does not confess this custom of his for the sake of commending it to the sense or judgment of the reader, – who sees it here for the first time it may be put into words or put on paper, who looks at it here, perhaps, for the first time objectively, from the critical stand-point which the review of another's confession creates; and though it may have been latent in the dim consciousness of his own experience, or practically developed, finds it now for the first time, collected from the phenomena of the blind, instinctive, human motivity, and put down on the page of science, as a principle in nature, in human nature also.

But this is indeed a Spartan combing and curling, that the author is falling to, in the introductory flourishes ('diversions' as he calls them) of this great adventure, that his pen is out for now: he is indeed upon the point of running headlong into the fiercest dangers; – it is the state, the wretched, discased, vicious state, dying apparently, yet full of teeth and mischief, that he is about to handle in his argument with these fine, lightsome, frolicsome preparations of his, without any perceptible 'mittens'; it is the heart of that political evil that his time groans with, and begins to find insufferable, that he is going to probe to the quick with that so delicate weapon. It is a tilt against the block and the rack, and all the instruments of torture, that he is going to manage, as handsomely, and with as many sacrifices to the graces, as the circumstances will admit of. But the political situation which he describes so boldly (and we have already seen what it is) affects us here in its relation to the question of style only, and as the author himself connects it with the point of our inquiry.