The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay Vol 3
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Unknown >> The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay Vol 3
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16 This etext was prepared by Dr Mike Alder and Sue Asscher
from the book made available by Dr Mike Alder.
THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
OF
LORD MACAULAY.
VOLUME III.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
AND
MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.
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)
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 House of Lords his oratory,
lucid, pointed, lively, and set off with every grace of
pronunciation and of gesture, extorted the attention and
admiration even of a hostile majority. Some of the most
remarkable protests which appear in the journals of the peers
were drawn up by him; and in some of the bitterest of those
pamphlets which called on the English to stand up for their
country against the aliens who had come from beyond the seas to
oppress and plunder her, critics easily detected his style. When
the rebellion of 1715 broke out, he refused to sign the paper in
which the bishops of the province of Canterbury declared their
attachment to the Protestant succession. He busied himself in
electioneering, especially at Westminster, where, as dean, he
possessed great influence; and was, indeed, strongly suspected of
having once set on a riotous mob to prevent his Whig fellow-
citizens from polling.
After having been long in indirect communication with the exiled
family, he, in 1717, began to correspond directly with the
Pretender. The first letter of the correspondence is extant. In
that letter Atterbury boasts of having, during many years past,
neglected no opportunity of serving the Jacobite cause. "My
daily prayer," he says, "is that you may have success. May I
live to see that day, and live no longer than I do what is in my
power to forward it." It is to be remembered that he who wrote
thus was a man bound to set to the church of which he was
overseer an example of strict probity; that he had repeatedly
sworn allegiance to the House of Brunswick; that he had assisted
in placing the crown on the head of George I., and that he had
abjured James III., "without equivocation or mental reservation,
on the true faith of a Christian."
It is agreeable to turn from his public to his private life. His
turbulent spirit, wearied with faction and treason, now and then
required repose, and found it in domestic endearments, and in the
society of the most illustrious of the living and of the dead.
Of his wife little is known: but between him and his daughter
there was an affection singularly close and tender. The
gentleness of his manners when he was in the company of a few
friends was such as seemed hardly credible to those who knew him
only by his writings and speeches. The charm of his "softer
hour" has been commemorated by one of those friends in
imperishable verse. Though Atterbury's classical attainments
were not great, his taste in English literature was excellent;
and his admiration of genius was so strong that it overpowered
even his political and religious antipathies. His fondness for
Milton, the mortal enemy of the Stuarts and of the church, was
such as to many Tories seemed a crime. On the sad night on which
Addison was laid in the chapel of Henry VII., the Westminster
boys remarked that Atterbury read the funeral service with a
peculiar tenderness and solemnity. The favourite companions,
however, of the great Tory prelate were, as might have been
expected, men whose politics had at least a tinge of Toryism. He
lived on friendly terms with Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay. With
Prior he had a close intimacy, which some misunderstanding about
public affairs at last dissolved. Pope found in Atterbury, not
only a warm admirer, but a most faithful, fearless, and judicious
adviser. The poet was a frequent guest at the episcopal palace
among the elms of Bromley, and entertained not the slightest
suspicion that his host, now declining in years, confined to an
easy chair by gout, and apparently devoted to literature, was
deeply concerned in criminal and perilous designs against the
government.
The spirit of the Jacobites had been cowed by the events of 1715.
It revived in 1721. The failure of the South Sea project, the
panic in the money market, the downfall of great commercial
houses, the distress from which no part of the kingdom was
exempt, had produced general discontent. It seemed not
improbable that at such a moment an insurrection might be
successful. An insurrection was planned. The streets of London
were to be barricaded; the Tower and the Bank were to be
surprised; King George, his family, and his chief captains and
councillors, were to be arrested; and King James was to be
proclaimed. The design became known to the Duke of Orleans,
regent of France, who was on terms of friendship with the House
of Hanover. He put the English government on its guard. Some of
the chief malecontents were committed to prison; and among them
was Atterbury. No bishop of the Church of England had been taken
into custody since that memorable day when the applauses and
prayers of all London had followed the seven bishops to the gate
of the Tower. The Opposition entertained some hope that it might
be possible to excite among the people an enthusiasm resembling
that of their fathers, who rushed into the waters of the Thames
to implore the blessing of Sancroft. Pictures of the heroic
confessor in his cell were exhibited at the shop windows. Verses
in his praise were sung about the streets. The restraints by
which he was prevented from communicating with his accomplices
were represented as cruelties worthy of the dungeons of the
Inquisition. Strong appeals were made to the priesthood. Would
they tamely permit so gross an insult to be offered to their
cloth? Would they suffer the ablest, the most eloquent member of
their profession, the man who had so often stood up for their
rights against the civil power, to be treated like the vilest of
mankind? There was considerable excitement; but it was allayed
by a temperate and artful letter to the clergy, the work, in all
probability, of Bishop Gibson, who stood high in the favour of
Walpole, and shortly after became minister for ecclesiastical
affairs.
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