which account a Birmingham mob set fire to his house in 1791-adopted in his Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity the belief as to the inevitable character of human actions which Auguste Comte has extended widely in our own times. In his Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion Priestley's entire system is laid bare. But neither as theologian nor as philosopher will he be remembered so long as for his claim to a place in the temple of Science, in right of his discovery of oxygen. Lastly, William Paley, following Tucker, elaborated in his Moral and Political Philosophy, published in 1785, his well-known system of Utilitarianism: Virtue,' he said, 'is the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness.' Mackintosh remarks that it follows, as a necessary consequence from this proposition, that every act which flows from generosity or benevolence is a vice.' Political Science:-Bolingbroke, Burke, Godwin, Paine. 97. Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, who had, as before mentioned (sect. 1), been implicated in schemes for placing the Pretender' on the throne, fled to France in 1715, and was for some time associated with the Jacobite cause. Finding probably that, whatever might be its merits, that cause had incapable supporters, he succeeded in obtaining permission to return to England in 1723. He joined the party opposed to Walpole, and contributed powerful papers to their organ, the Craftsman. But a menacing speech from Walpole made him tremble for his safety, and he again retired to France in 1737. He returned in 1743, but his influence was gone; he was neither trusted nor respected; and he lived in retirement till his death in 1751. His collected writings, edited by David Mallet, appeared in 1754. In the preface to the first essay, a 'Dissertation on Parties,' written about 1737, he repudiates the Pretender, and says that the general design of these essays was 'to assert and vindicate the justice and honour of the Revolution; of the principles established, of the means employed, and of the ends obtained by it.' A striking conversion, indeed, in the ex-Secretary of State to the Court of St. Germains! Of his historical writings the chief objects were to clear up his own character, and to justify the Peace of Utrecht. His 'Letter to Sir William Wyndham,' privately printed and circulated about 1717, is vigorously written, and shows his 1 'Pretender' does not mean, as many persons imagine, one who makes a pretended and baseless claim, but merely one who puts forth a claim, like the French prétendant. style at its best. The 'Idea of a Patriot King,' a treatise fitter for the lecture-room than the council-chamber, seriously propounded, as a cure for the evils of the State, an extension of the royal prerogative, the sovereign being, as the constitution had come to be understood, unduly hampered by the House of Commons in his generous labours to promote the happiness of his people. Of course the king so enfranchised was to be very virtuous and truly patriotie; but how this was to be secured did not appear. Hume's political writings, on the Origin of Government, the Protestant Succession, the Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth, &c., &c., form a large portion of the two volumes of Essays and Treatises already mentioned. Hume regards political science as a speculative philosopher; in Burke the knowledge and the tendencies of the philosopher, the jurist, the statesman, and the patriot, appear all united. The fundamental idea of his political philosophy was, that civil liberty was rather prescriptive than theoretic; that Order implied Progress, and Progress presupposed Order; that in a political society the rights of its members were not absolute and unconditional, but strictly relative to, and to be sought in conformity with, the existing constitution of that society. These views are put forth, in the most masterly and eloquent manner, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790. Among those who supported in this country the political theories of the French Jacobins and Rousseau, the most eminent were William Godwin and Thomas Paine. The former published his Inquiry concerning Political Justice in 1793; the latter was living in America during the War of Independence, and, by the publication of his periodical tracts entitled Common Sense, contributed not a little to chase away the despondency which was beginning at one time to prevail among the colonists, and to define their position and political aims. The Rights of Man appeared in 1792, and the Age of Reason, a work conceived in the extremest French free-thinking spirit, in 1794. Samuel Parr is the subject of an amusing paper by De Quincey, 'Dr. Parr, or Whiggism in its relation to Literature' (1862). He is described as a little man, in a most plebeian wig,' with a lisp, like 'a little French gossipping abbé.' In person, character, and opinions he was the very antithesis of Johnson. He was a tyrannical and not very successful pedagogue. He is the author of numberless tracts and sermons, but the only piece of good literary work that he ever did was the introduction, in flowing and correct Latin, to an edition of Bellenden's De Statu (ante, III., 87). Political Economy:-Adam Smith, Malthus; Criticism :-Warton, Burke; Esthetics :-Reynolds, Walpole. 98. The science of Political Economy was, if not invented, at least enlarged, simplified, and systematised by Adam Smith, in his celebrated Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The late rise of this science may be ascribed to several causes ;-to the contempt with which the ancient Greek philosophers regarded the whole business of money-getting; to the aversion entertained by the philosophers of later schools for luxury, as the great depraver of morals, whence they would be little disposed to analyse the sources of that wealth, the accumulation of which made luxury possible; lastly, to the circumstance that during the Middle Ages the clergy were the sole educators of society, and were not likely to undertake the study of phenomena which lay quite out of their track of thought and action. Only when the laity came to be generally educated, and began to reflect intelligently upon the principles and laws involved in the every-day operations of the temporal life, could a science of wealth become possible. Certain peculiarities about the East Indian trade of the seventeenth century, which consisted chiefly in the exchange of silks and other Indian manufactures for bullion, gave occasion to a number of pamphlets, in which the true principles of commerce were gradually developed. But what was called the 'mercantile system' was long the favourite doctrine both with statesmen and economists, and, indeed, is even yet not quite exploded. By this was meant a system of cunning devices, having for their object, by repressing trade in one direction, and encouraging it in another, to leave the community at the end of each year more plentifully supplied with the precious metals (in which alone wealth was then supposed to consist) than at the end of the preceding. The tradition of overgovernment, which had come down from the Roman empire, joined to the narrow corporate spirit which had arisen among the great trading cities of the Middle Ages, led naturally to such views of national economy. Every one knows what efforts it has cost in our own days to establish the simple principle of commercial freedom-the right to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market.' That this principle has at last prevailed, and that money, in so far as it is not itself a mere commodity, is now regarded, not as wealth, but as the variable representative of wealth, is mainly due to the great work of Adam Smith. Thomas R. Malthus, a Cambridge man, published in 1798 his celebrated Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he endeavours to prove that it is the invariable tendency of population to increase faster, than the means of subsistence. 99. Joseph, brother of Thomas Warton, is the author of an able Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756). Burke published in the same year his celebrated philosophical Essay on the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He was then a young man, and had studied philosophy in the sensuous school of Locke; at a later period of his life, he would probably have imported into his essay some of the transcendental ideas which had been brought to light in the interval, and for which his mind presented a towardly and congenial soil. The analysis of those impressions on the mind which raise the emotion of the sublime or that of the beautiful is carefully and ingeniously made; the logic is generally sound; and if the theory does not seem to be incontrovertibly established as a whole, the illustrative reasoning employed in support of it is, for the most part, striking, picturesque, and true. The reader may find it difficult to understand how these two judgments can be mutually consistent, yet it is perfectly intelligible. The theory, for instance, which makes the emotion of the sublime inseparably associated with the sense of the terrible (terror, the common stock of everything that is sublime,' part ii. sect. 5), is not quite proved; for he gives magnificence -such as that of the starry heavens- -as a source of the sublime, without showing (indeed, it would be difficult to show) that whatever was magnificent was necessarily also terrible. But at the same time he proves, with great ingenuity and completeness, that in a great many cases, when the emotion of the sublime is present, the element of terror is, if not a necessary condition, at any rate a concomitant and influential circumstance. His theory of the beautiful is equally ingenious, but perhaps still more disputable. By beauty he means (part iii. sect. 1) 'that quality, or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love or some passion similar to it.' He labours at length to prove that beauty does not depend upon proportion, nor upon fitness for the end designed; but that it does chiefly depend on the five following properties:-1, smallness; 2, smoothness; 3, gradual variation; 4, delicacy; 5, mild tone in colour. That the emotion of beauty is unconnected with the perception of harmony or proportion is certainly a bold assertion. However, even if the analysis were ever so accurate and perfect, it might still be maintained that the treatise contains little that is really valuable towards the formation of a sound system of criticism, either in æsthetics or literature. The reason is briefly this-that the quality which men chiefly look for in works of art and literature is that which is variously named genius, greatness, nobleness, distinction, the ideal, &c.; where this quality is absent, all Burke's formal criteria for testing the presence of the sublime or the beautiful may be complied with, and yet the work will remain intrinsically insignificant. As applied to nature, the analysis may perhaps be of more value; because the mystery of infinity forms the background to each natural scene; the divine calm of the universe is behind the mountain peak or the rolling surf, and furnishes punctually, and in all cases, that element of nobleness which, in the works of man, is present only in the higher souls. Hence, there being no fear that we shall ever find Nature, if we understand her, mean, or trivial, or superficial, as we often find the human artist,- -we may properly concentrate our attention on the sources of the particular emotions which her scenes excite; and among these particular emotions those of the sublime and beautiful are second to none in power. 100. Sir Joshua Reynolds' excellent Discourses on Painting, or rather the first part of them, appeared in 1779. Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting, compiled from the unwieldy collections of Virtue on the lives and works of British artists, were published between the years 1761 and 1771. William Gilpin, vicar of Boldre, in the New Forest, is the author of a delightful book, Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791). Sir Uvedale Price, in his Essays on the Picturesque, produced the first good book on Landscape gardening. sure. 101. The Letters of Lord Chesterfield to his natural son, Philip Stanhope, were published soon after the writer's death. in 1773. Johnson, who never forgave Lord Chesterfield for having treated him, at a time when he stood in great need of patronage, with coldness and neglect, said that the Letters 'taught the morals of a courtezan, and the manners of a dancing-master.' There is more point than truth in this cenThere might have been some awkwardness in writing about morals, considering to whom the letters were addressed; the subject of conduct, therefore, in regard to great matters, is not touched upon; but good conduct in little things, selfdenial in trifles,-in a word, all that constitutes good breeding, -is enforced with much grace and propriety. Johnson himself was only too vulnerable on this head; Lord Chesterfield describes him in the Letters under the character of a 'respectable Hottentot.' |