divine autocracy. "The celestial court," omnipotent and omniscient, hurled its bolt at the pacific heretic of England. It menaced his title, while its priests busily inculcated that "anything may be done against heretics, because they are worse than Turks and infidels;" then barrels of gunpowder were placed under his throne, and the papal breves equally shook his dominion by absolving the Romanists of England from their oath of allegiance. The English monarch chose to be the advocate of his own cause, to vindicate his regal rights, and to protest before all Europe against this monstrous usurpation. He wrote "The Apology for the Oath of Allegiance," and we must concede to his tract this merit, that if the cause were small, boundless and enduring was the effect. In every country in Europe, through all the ranks of the learned, and for many a year, this effusion of James occupied the pens alike of the advocates of the apostolical court, and of the promulgaters of the emancipation of mankind ;* nor is it remotely connected with the noble genius of Paul Sarpi, whose great work was first published in London, and patronised by the English monarch.

It was on a nation divided into unequal parties of irreconcilable opinions that James conferred the dubious blessing of a long peace; for twenty years there were no wars but the battle of pens, and the long artillery of a hundred volumes.

Polemical studies become political when the heads of parties mask themselves under some particular doctrine. Opinion only can neutralize opinion; but in the age of doctrines before us, authority was considered stronger than opinion, and in their unsettled notions and contested principles, each party seemed to itself impregnable. Every Æneas brandished his weapon, but could never

A curious list of some of the more remarkable controversialists on both sides may be found in Irving's "Lives of the Scottish Poets," ii., 234.

wound the flitting chimeras. It was in the spirit of the age that Dr. Sutcliff, the Dean of Exeter, laid the foundations of a college for controversies or disputations at Chelsea, on the banks of the quiet Thames. In this institution the provost and the fellows were unceasingly to answer the Romanist and the Mar-Prelate. The fervent dean scraped together all his properties in many an odd shape to endow it, obtained a charter, and obscured his own name by calling it " King James's College." He lived to see a small building begun, but which, like the controversies, was not to be finished. A college for controversy verily required inexhaustible funds. When the day arrived that those became the masters whom these dogmatists had so constantly refuted, the controversial college was oddly changed into a manufactory of leather-guns, which probably were not more efficacious.

James ascended the English throne as a poor man comes to a large inheritance. In securing peace he deemed he had granted the people all they desired, and he was the only monarch that cast a generous thought on their social recreations. That image of peace and of delight was to be reflected in the court; and in that enchanted circle of flattery and of hope, the silvery voices of his silken parasites told how "he gave like a king ;” but he himself, a man of simple habits, with an utter carelessness of money, learned a lesson which he never rightly comprehended, how an exchequer might be voided.

James was a polemical monarch when polemics were political. But what creed or system did this royal polemic wholly adopt? Born of Roman catholic parents and not abhorrent to the mother-church, for the childhood of antiquity had its charms for him; brought up among the Scottish presbyterians, with whom he served a long accommodating apprenticeship of royalty, and with the doctrines of the Anglican church become VOL. II-32

the sovereign of three realms, did James, like his broth er of France, modify his creed for a crown, by the state-religion?

Behold this luckless philosopher on the throne closing the last accounts of his royalty with nothing but zeros in his own favor. By puritans hated, by Romanists misliked, and surrounded by trains of the "blue bonnets," who were acted on the stage, and balladed in the streets; little gracious with his English subjects, to whom from the first "the coming-in" seemed as much like an invasion as an accession; never forgiven by the foreigner for his insular genius, whose pacific policy refused to enter into a project of visionary conquest; and finally falling into a new age, when the monarch, reduced to a mere metaphysical abstraction, whose prerogative and privilege were alike indefinite, had to wrestle with "the five hundred kings," as James once called the commons; deservedly or undeservedly, this monarch for all parties was a convenient subject for panegyric or for libel, true or false.

But in reality what was the character of James the First? Where shall we find it ?*

* I have at least honestly attempted "An Inquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First;"-"Miscellanies of Lit erature."

375

PAMPHLETS.

PAMPHLETS, those leaves of the hour, and volumes of a season and even of a week, slight and evanescent things as they appear, and scorned at by opposite parties while each cherishes their own, are in truth the records of the public mind, the secret history of a people which does not always appear in the more open narrative; the true bent and temper of the times, the contending interests, the appeal of a party, or the voice of the nation are nowhere so vividly brought before us as by these advocates of their own cause, too deeply interested to disguise their designs, and too contracted in their space to omit their essential points.

Of all the nations of Europe our country first offered a rapid succession of these busy records of men's thoughts, their contending interests, their mightier passions, their aspirations, and sometimes even their follies. Wherever pamphlets abound there is freedom, and therefore have we been a nation of pamphleteers.

Even at the time when the press was not yet free, an invincible pamphlet struck a terror; the establishment of the Anglican church under Elizabeth disturbed the little synagogue of puritans, and provoked the fury of the Mar-Prelate pamphlets; the pacific reign of James covered the land with a new harvest of agricultural pamphlets; but when we entered on an age when men thought what they listed, and wrote what they thought, pamphlets ran through the land, and then the philosophical speculator on human affairs read what had never before been written; the troubles of Charles the First and the nation sounded the trumpet of civil war by the blast of pamphlets; state-plots and state-cabals were hatched at least by the press, under the second Charles,

and popery and arbitrary government terrified the nation by their pamphlets; the principles of English government and toleration expanded in the pamphlets of the reign of William the Third, even Locke's Treatises on Toleration and on Government were at first but pamphlets; and under Anne the nation observed the light skirmishes of whig and tory pamphlets.

Our neighbors in their great revolutionary agitation, if they could not comprehend our constitution, imitated our arts of insurgency, and from the same impulses at length rivalled us; but the very term of pamphlet is English; and the practice seemed to them so novel, that a recent French biographer designates an early period of the French revolution as one when "the art of pamphlets had not yet reached perfection."

The history of pamphlets would form an extraordinary history; but whoever gathers a history from pamphlets must prepare for contradiction. Rushworth had formed a great collection to supply the materials of his volumes, but speaks slightly of them, while insinuating his own sagacity in separating truth from falsehood; but he concluded "very suspiciously," observed Oldys, that none need trouble themselves with any further examination than what he had been pleased to make. This suspicion was more manifest when Nalson began another collection from pamphlets to shake the evidence of the pamphlets of Rushworth. Each had found what he craved for; for whoever will look only into those on his favorite side, finds enough written with his own passions, but he will obtain little extension of knowledge, for this is much like looking at his own face in a glass.

But we must not consider pamphlets wholly in a political view; their circuit is boundless, holding all the world of man; they enter into every object of human interest. The silent revolutions in manners, language, habits, are there to be traced; the interest