Misc Writings and Speeches(米斯克说与写3)

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THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

THE

MISCELLANEOUS

WRITINGS AND

SPEECHES OF LORD

MACAULAY.

VOLUME III.

LORD MACAULAY.

THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

CONTENTS.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA.

Francis Atterbury. (December 1853)

John Bunyan. (May 1854)

Oliver Goldsmith. (February 1856)

Samuel Johnson. (December 1856)

William Pitt. (January 1859)

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.

Epitaph on Henry Martyn. (1812)

Lines to the Memory of Pitt. (1813)

A Radical War Song. (1820)

The Battle of Moncontour. (1824)

The Battle of Naseby, by Obadiah Bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-

their-nobles-with-links-of-iron, Serjeant in Ireton's Regiment. (1824)

Sermon in a Churchyard. (1825)

Translation of a Poem by Arnault. (1826)

Dies Irae. (1826)

The Marriage of Tirzah and Ahirad. (1827)

The Country Clergyman's Trip to Cambridge. An Election Ballad.

(1827)

Song. (1827)

Political Georgics. (March 1828)

The Deliverance of Vienna. (1828)

The Last Buccaneer. (1839)

Epitaph on a Jacobite. (1845)

Lines Written in August, 1847.

Translation from Plautus. (1850)

Paraphrase of a Passage in the Chronicle of the Monk of St Gall.

(1856)

Inscription on the Statue of Lord Wm. Bentinck, at Calcutta. (1835)

Epitaph on Sir Benjamin Heath Malkin, at Calcutta. (1837)

Epitaph on Lord Metcalfe. (1847)

THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

FRANCIS ATTERBURY.

(December 1853.)

Francis Atterbury, a man who holds a conspicuous place in the

political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of England, was born in the

year 1662, at Middleton in Buckinghamshire, a parish of which his father

was rector. Francis was educated at Westminster School, and carried

thence to Christchurch a stock of learning which, though really scanty, he

through life exhibited with such judicious ostentation that superficial

observers believed his attainments to be immense. At Oxford, his parts, his

taste, and his bold, contemptuous, and imperious spirit, soon made him

conspicuous. Here he published at twenty, his first work, a translation of

the noble poem of Absalom and Achitophel into Latin verse. Neither the

style nor the versification of the young scholar was that of the Augustan

age. In English composition he succeeded much better. In 1687 he

distinguished himself among many able men who wrote in defence of the

Church of England, then persecuted by James II., and calumniated by

apostates who had for lucre quitted her communion. Among these

apostates none was more active or malignant than Obadiah Walker, who

was master of University College, and who had set up there, under the

royal patronage, a press for printing tracts against the established religion.

In one of these tracts, written apparently by Walker himself, many

aspersions were thrown on Martin Luther. Atterbury undertook to defend

the great Saxon Reformer, and performed that task in a manner singularly

characteristic. Whoever examines his reply to Walker will be struck by the

contrast between the feebleness of those parts which are argumentative

and defensive, and the vigour of those parts which are rhetorical and

aggressive. The Papists were so much galled by the sarcasms and

invectives of the young polemic that they raised a cry of treason, and

accused him of having, by implication, called King James a Judas.

After the Revolution, Atterbury, though bred in the doctrines of non-

resistance and passive obedience, readily swore fealty to the new

government. In no long time he took holy orders. He occasionally

preached in London with an eloquence which raised his reputation, and

THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

soon had the honour of being appointed one of the royal chaplains. But he

ordinarily resided at Oxford, where he took an active part in academical

business, directed the classical studies of the undergraduates of his college,

and was the chief adviser and assistant of Dean Aldrich, a divine now

chiefly remembered by his catches, but renowned among his

contemporaries as a scholar, a Tory, and a high-churchman. It was the

practice, not a very judicious practice, of Aldrich to employ the most

promising youths of his college in editing Greek and Latin books. Among

the studious and well-disposed lads who were, unfortunately for

themselves, induced to become teachers of philology when they should

have been content to be learners, was Charles Boyle, son of the Earl of

Orrery, and nephew of Robert Boyle, the great experimental philosopher.

The task assigned to Charles Boyle was to prepare a new edition of one of

the most worthless books in existence. It was a fashion, among those

Greeks and Romans who cultivated rhetoric as an art, to compose epistles

and harangues in the names of eminent men. Some of these counterfeits

are fabricated with such exquisite taste and skill that it is the highest

achievement of criticism to distinguish them from originals. Others are so

feebly and rudely executed that they can hardly impose on an intelligent

schoolboy. The best specimen which has come down to us is perhaps the

oration for Marcellus, such an imitation of Tully's eloquence as Tully

would himself have read with wonder and delight. The worst specimen is

perhaps a collection of letters purporting to have been written by that

Phalaris who governed Agrigentum more than 500 years before the

Christian era. The evidence, both internal and external, against the

genuineness of these letters is overwhelming. When, in the fifteenth

century, they emerged, in company with much that was far more valuable,

from their obscurity, they were pronounced spurious by Politian, the

greatest scholar of Italy, and by Erasmus, the greatest scholar on our side

of the Alps. In truth, it would be as easy to persuade an educated

Englishman that one of Johnson's Ramblers was the work of William

Wallace as to persuade a man like Erasmus that a pedantic exercise,

composed in the trim and artificial Attic of the time of Julian, was a

despatch written by a crafty and ferocious Dorian, who roasted people

THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

alive many years before there existed a volume of prose in the Greek

language. But, though Christchurch could boast of many good Latinists, of

many good English writers, and of a greater number of clever and

fashionable men of the world than belonged to any other academic body,

there was not then in the college a single man capable of distinguishing

between the infancy and the dotage of Greek literature. So superficial

indeed was the learning of the rulers of this celebrated society that they

were charmed by an essay which Sir William Temple published in praise

of the ancient writers. It now seems strange that even the eminent public

services, the deserved popularity, and the graceful style of Temple should

have saved so silly a performance from universal contempt. Of the books

which he most vehemently eulogised his eulogies proved that he knew

nothing. In fact, he could not read a line of the language in which they

were written. Among many other foolish things, he said that the letters of

Phalaris were the oldest letters and also the best in the world. Whatever

Temple wrote attracted notice. People who had never heard of the Epistles

of Phalaris began to inquire about them. Aldrich, who knew very little

Greek, took the word of Temple who knew none, and desired Boyle to

prepare a new edition of these admirable compositions which, having long

slept in obscurity, had become on a sudden objects of general interest.

The edition was prepared with the help of Atterbury, who was Boyle's

tutor, and of some other members of the college. It was an edition such as

might be expected from people who would stoop to edite such a book. The

notes were worthy of the text; the Latin version worthy of the Greek

original. The volume would have been forgotten in a month, had not a

misunderstanding about a manuscript arisen between the young editor and

the greatest scholar that had appeared in Europe since the revival of letters,

Richard Bentley. The manuscript was in Bentley's keeping. Boyle wished

it to be collated. A mischief-making bookseller informed him that Bentley

had refused to lend it, which was false, and also that Bentley had spoken

contemptuously of the letters attributed to Phalaris, and of the critics who

were taken in by such counterfeits, which was perfectly true. Boyle, much

provoked, paid, in his preface, a bitterly ironical compliment to Bentley's

courtesy. Bentley revenged himself by a short dissertation, in which he

THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

proved that the epistles were spurious, and the new edition of them

worthless: but he treated Boyle personally with civility as a young

gentleman of great hopes, whose love of learning was highly

commendable, and who deserved to have had better instructors.

Few things in literary history are more extraordinary than the storm

which this little dissertation raised. Bentley had treated Boyle with

forbearance; but he had treated Christchurch with contempt; and the

Christchurch-men, wherever dispersed, were as much attached to their

college as a Scotchman to his country, or a Jesuit to his order. Their

influence was great. They were dominant at Oxford, powerful in the Inns

of Court and in the College of Physicians, conspicuous in Parliament and

in the literary and fashionable circles of London. Their unanimous cry was,

that the honour of the college must be vindicated, that the insolent

Cambridge pedant must be put down. Poor Boyle was unequal to the task,

and disinclined to it. It was, therefore, assigned to his tutor, Atterbury.

The answer to Bentley, which bears the name of Boyle, but which was,

in truth, no more the work of Boyle than the letters to which the

controversy related were the work of Phalaris, is now read only by the

curious, and will in all probability never be reprinted again. But it had its

day of noisy popularity. It was to be found, not only in the studies of men

of letters, but on the tables of the most brilliant drawing-rooms of Soho

Square and Covent Garden. Even the beaus and coquettes of that age, the

Wildairs and the Lady Lurewells, the Mirabells and the Millaments,

congratulated each other on the way in which the gay young gentleman,

whose erudition sate so easily upon him, and who wrote with so much

pleasantry and good breeding about the Attic dialect and the anapaestic

measure, Sicilian talents and Thericlean cups, had bantered the queer prig

of a doctor. Nor was the applause of the multitude undeserved. The book

is, indeed, Atterbury's masterpiece, and gives a higher notion of his

powers than any of those works to which he put his name. That he was

altogether in the wrong on the main question, and on all the collateral

questions springing out of it, that his knowledge of the language, the

literature, and the history of Greece was not equal to what many freshmen

now bring up every year to Cambridge and Oxford, and that some of his

THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

blunders seem rather to deserve a flogging than a refutation, is true; and

therefore it is that his performance is, in the highest degree, interesting and

valuable to a judicious reader. It is good by reason of its exceeding

badness. It is the most extraordinary instance that exists of the art of

making much show with little substance. There is no difficulty, says the

steward of Moliere's miser, in giving a fine dinner with plenty of money:

the really great cook is he who can set out a banquet with no money at all.

That Bentley should have written excellently on ancient chronology and

geography, on the development of the Greek language, and the origin of

the Greek drama, is not strange. But that Atterbury should, during some

years, have been thought to have treated these subjects much better than

Bentley is strange indeed. It is true that the champion of Christchurch had

all the help which the most celebrated members of that society could give

him. Smalridge contributed some very good wit; Friend and others some

very bad archaeology and philology. But the greater part of the volume

was entirely Atterbury's: what was not his own was revised and retouched

by him: and the whole bears the mark of his mind, a mind inexhaustibly

rich in all the resources of controversy, and familiar with all the artifices

which make falsehood look like truth, and ignorance like knowledge. He

had little gold; but he beat that little out to the very thinnest leaf, and

spread it over so vast a surface that to those who judged by a glance, and

who did not resort to balances and tests, the glittering heap of worthless

matter which he produced seemed to be an inestimable treasure of massy

bullion. Such arguments as he had he placed in the clearest light. Where he

had no arguments, he resorted to personalities, sometimes serious,

generally ludicrous, always clever and cutting. But, whether he was grave

or merry, whether he reasoned or sneered, his style was always pure,

polished, and easy.

Party spirit then ran high; yet, though Bentley ranked among Whigs,

and Christchurch was a stronghold of Toryism, Whigs joined with Tories

in applauding Atterbury's volume. Garth insulted Bentley, and extolled

Boyle in lines which are now never quoted except to be laughed at. Swift,

in his "Battle of the Books," introduced with much pleasantry Boyle, clad

in armour, the gift of all the gods, and directed by Apollo in the form of a

THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

human friend, for whose name a blank is left which may easily be filled up.

The youth, so accoutred, and so assisted, gains an easy victory over his

uncourteous and boastful antagonist. Bentley, meanwhile, was supported

by the consciousness of an immeasurable superiority, and encouraged by

the voices of the few who were really competent to judge the combat. "No

man," he said, justly and nobly, "was ever written down but by himself."

He spent two years in preparing a reply, which will never cease to be read

and prized while the literature of ancient Greece is studied in any part of

the world. This reply proved, not only that the letters ascribed to Phalaris

were spurious, but that Atterbury, with all his wit, his eloquence, his skill

in controversial fence, was the most audacious pretender that ever wrote

about what he did not understand. But to Atterbury this exposure was

matter of indifference. He was now engaged in a dispute about matters far

more important and exciting than the laws of Zaleucus and the laws of

Charondas. The rage of religious factions was extreme. High church and

Low church divided the nation. The great majority of the clergy were on

the high-church side; the majority of King William's bishops were inclined

to latitudinarianism. A dispute arose between the two parties touching the

extent of the powers of the Lower House of Convocation. Atterbury thrust

himself eagerly into the front rank of the high-churchmen. Those who take

a comprehensive and impartial view of his whole career will not be

disposed to give him credit for religious zeal. But it was his nature to be

vehement and pugnacious in the cause of every fraternity of which he was

a member. He had defended the genuineness of a spurious book simply

because Christchurch had put forth an edition of that book; he now stood

up for the clergy against the civil power, simply because he was a

clergyman, and for the priests against the episcopal order, simply because

he was as yet only a priest. He asserted the pretensions of the class to

which he belonged in several treatises written with much wit, ingenuity,

audacity, and acrimony. In this, as in his first controversy, he was opposed

to antagonists whose knowledge of the subject in dispute was far superior

to his; but in this, as in his first controversy, he imposed on the multitude

by bold assertion, by sarcasm, by declamation, and, above all, by his

peculiar knack of exhibiting a little erudition in such a manner as to make

THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

it look like a great deal. Having passed himself off on the world as a

greater master of classical learning than Bentley, he now passed himself

off as a greater master of ecclesiastical learning than Wake or Gibson. By

the great body of the clergy he was regarded as the ablest and most

intrepid tribune that had ever defended their rights against the oligarchy of

prelates. The lower House of Convocation voted him thanks for his

services; the University of Oxford created him a doctor of divinity; and

soon after the accession of Anne, while the Tories still had the chief

weight in the government, he was promoted to the deanery of Carlisle.

Soon after he had obtained this preferment, the Whig party rose to

ascendency in the state. From that party he could expect no favour. Six

years elapsed before a change of fortune took place. At length, in the year

1710, the prosecution of Sacheverell produced a formidable explosion of

high-church fanaticism. At such a moment Atterbury could not fail to be

conspicuous. His inordinate zeal for the body to which he belonged, his

turbulent and aspiring temper, his rare talents for agitation and for

controversy, were again signally displayed. He bore a chief part in framing

that artful and eloquent speech which the accused divine pronounced at

the bar of the Lords, and which presents a singular contrast to the absurd

and scurrilous sermon which had very unwisely been honoured with

impeachment. During the troubled and anxious months which followed the

trial, Atterbury was among the most active of those pamphleteers who

inflamed the nation against the Whig ministry and the Whig parliament.

When the ministry had been changed and the parliament dissolved,

rewards were showered upon him. The Lower House of Convocation

elected him prolocutor. The Queen appointed him Dean of Christchurch

on the death of his old friend and patron Aldrich. The college would have

preferred a gentler ruler. Nevertheless, the new head was received with

every mark of honour. A congratulatory oration in Latin was addressed to

him in the magnificent vestibule of the hall; and he in reply professed the

warmest attachment to the venerable house in which he had been educated,

and paid many gracious compliments to those over whom he was to

preside. But it was not in his nature to be a mild or an equitable governor.

He had left the chapter of Carlisle distracted by quarrels. He found

THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

Christchurch at peace; but in three months his despotic and contentious

temper did at Christchurch what it had done at Carlisle. He was succeeded

in both his deaneries by the humane and accomplished Smalridge, who

gently complained of the state in which both had been left. "Atterbury

goes before, and sets everything on fire. I come after him with a bucket of

water." It was said by Atterbury's enemies that he was made a bishop

because he was so bad a dean. Under his administration Christchurch was

in confusion, scandalous altercations took place, opprobrious words were

exchanged; and there was reason to fear that the great Tory college would

be ruined by the tyranny of the great Tory doctor. He was soon removed to

the bishopric of Rochester, which was then always united with the deanery

of Westminster. Still higher dignities seemed to be before him. For, though

there were many able men on the episcopal bench, there was none who

equalled or approached him in parliamentary talents. Had his party

continued in power, it is not improbable that he would have been raised to

the archbishopric of Canterbury. The more splendid his prospects, the

more reason he had to dread the accession of a family which was well-

known to be partial to the Whigs. There is every reason to believe that he

was one of those politicians who hoped that they might be able, during the

life of Anne, to prepare matters in such a way that at her decease there

might be little difficulty in setting aside the Act of Settlement and placing

the Pretender on the throne. Her sudden death confounded the projects of

these conspirators. Atterbury, who wanted no kind of courage, implored

his confederates to proclaim James III., and offered to accompany the

heralds in lawn sleeves. But he found even the bravest soldiers of his party

irresolute, and exclaimed, not, it is said, without interjections which ill

became the mouth of a father of the church, that the best of all causes and

the most precious of all moments had been pusillanimously thrown away.

He acquiesced in what he could not prevent, took the oaths to the House of

Hanover, and at the coronation officiated with the outward show of zeal,

and did his best to ingratiate himself with the royal family. But his

servility was requited with cold contempt. No creature is so revengeful as

a proud man who has humbled himself in vain. Atterbury became the most

factious and pertinacious of all the opponents of the government. In the

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THEMISCELLANEOUSWRITINGSANDSPEECHESOFLORDMACAULAY.1THEMISCELLANEOUSWRITINGSANDSPEECHESOFLORDMACAULAY.VOLUMEIII.LORDMACAULAY.THEMISCELLANEOUSWRITINGSANDSPEECHESOFLORDMACAULAY.2CONTENTS.CONTRIBUTIONSTOTHEENCYCLOPAEDIABRITANNICA.FrancisAtterbury.(December1853)JohnBunyan.(May1854)OliverGoldsmith.(Februa...

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