The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iii Part 26

Prudence installed as virtue, instead of being employed as one of her indispensable handmaids, and the products of this exemplified and ill.u.s.trated in the life of Archbishop Williams, as a work, I could warmly recommend to my dearest Hartley. Williams was a man bred up to the determination of being righteous, both honorably striving and selfishly ambitious, but all within the bounds and permission of the law, the reigning system of casuistry; in short, an egotist in morals, and a worldling in impulses and motives. And yet by pride and by innate n.o.bleness of nature munificent and benevolent, with all the negative virtues of temperance, chast.i.ty, and the like,--take this man on his road to his own worldly aggrandizement. Winding his way through a grove of powerful rogues, by flattery, professions of devoted attachment, and by actual and zealous as well as able services, and at length becoming in fact nearly as great a knave as the knaves (Duke of Buckingham for example) whose favor and support he had been conciliating,--till at last in some dilemma, some strait between conscience and fear, and increased confidence in his own political strength, he opposes or hesitates to further some too foolish or wicked project of his patron knave, or affronts his pride by counselling a different course (not a less wicked, but one more profitable and conducive to his Grace's elevation);-and then is 'floored' or crushed by him, and falls unknown and unpitied.

Such was that truly wonderful scholar and statesman, Archbishop Williams.

Part 1. s. 61.

'And G.o.d forbid that any other course, should be attempted. For this liberty was settled on the subject, with such imprecations upon the infringers, that if they should remove these great landmarks, they must look for vengeance, as if entailed by public vows on them and their posterity.' These were the Dean's instructions, &c.

He deserves great credit for them. They put him in strong contrast with Laud.

Ib. s. 80.

Thus for them both together he solicits:--My most n.o.ble lord, what true applause and admiration the King and your Honor have gained, &c.

All this we, in the year 1833, should call abject and base; but was it so in Bishop Williams? In the history of the morality of a people, prudence, yea cunning, is the earliest form of virtue. This is expressed in Jacob, and in Ulysses and all the most ancient fables. It will require the true philosophic calm and serenity to distinguish and appreciate the character of the morality of our great men from Henry VIII to the close of James I,--'nullum numen abest, si sit prudentia',--and of those of Charles I to the Restoration. The difference almost amounts to contrast.

Ib. s. 81-2.

How is it that any deeply-read historian should not see how imperfect and precarious the rights of personal liberty were during this period; or, seeing it, refuse to do justice to the patriots under Charles I? The truth is, that from the reign of Edward I, (to go no farther backward), there was a spirit of freedom in the people at large, which all our kings in their senses were cautious not to awaken by too rudely treading on it; but for individuals, as such, there was none till the conflict with the Stuarts.

Ib. s. 84.

Of such a conclusion of state, 'quae aliquando incognita, semper justa', &c.

This perversion of words respecting the decrees of Providence to the caprices of James and his bes...o...b..red minion the Duke of Buckingham, is somewhat nearer to blasphemy than even the euphuism of the age can excuse.

Ib. s. 85.

... tuus, O Jacobe, quod optas Explorare labor, mihi jussa capessere fas est.

In our times this would be pedantic wit: in the days of James I, and in the mouth of Archbishop Williams it was witty pedantry.

Ib. s. 89.

He that doth much in a short life products his mortality.

'Products' for 'produces;' that is, lengthens out, 'ut apud geometros'.

But why Hacket did not say 'prolongs,' I know not.

Ib.

See what a globe of light there is in natural reason, which is the same in every man: but when it takes well, and riseth to perfection, it is called wisdom in a few.

The good affirming itself--(the will, I am)--begetteth the true, and wisdom is the spirit proceeding. But in the popular acceptation, common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.

Ib. s. 92.

A well-spirited clause, and agreeable to holy a.s.surance, that truth is more like to win than love. Could the light of such a Gospel as we profess be eclipsed with the interposition of a single marriage?

And yet Hacket must have lived to see the practical confutation of this shallow Gnathonism in the result of the marriage with the Papist Henrietta of France!

Ib. s. 96.

"Floud," says the Lord Keeper, "since I am no Bishop in your opinion, I will be no Bishop to you."

I see the wit of this speech; but the wisdom, the Christianity, the beseemingness of it in a Judge and a Bishop,--what am I to say of that?

Ib.

And after the period of his presidency (of the Star Chamber), it is too well known how far the enhancements were stretched. 'But the wringing of the nose bringeth forth blood'. Prov. 30-33.

We may learn from this and fifty other pa.s.sages, that it did not require the factious prejudices of Prynne or Burton to look with aversion on the proceedings of Laud. Bishop Hacket was as hot a royalist as a loyal Englishman could be, yet Laud was 'allii nimis'.

Ib. s. 97.

New stars have appeared and vanished: the ancient asterisms remain; there's not an old star missing.

If they had been, they would not have been old. This therefore, like many of Lord Bacon's ill.u.s.trations, has more wit than meaning. But it is a good trick of rhetoric. The vividness of the image, 'per se', makes men overlook the imperfection of the simile. "You see my hand, the hand of a poor, puny fellow-mortal; and will you pretend not to see the hand of Providence in this business? He who sees a mouse must be wilfully blind if he does not see an elephant!"

Ib. s. 100.

The error of the first James,--an ever well-intending, well-resolving, but, alas! ill-performing monarch, a kind-hearted, affectionate, and fondling old man, really and extensively learned, yea, and as far as quick wit and a shrewd judgment go to the making up of wisdom, wise in his generation, and a pedant by the right of pedantry, conceded at that time to all men of learning (Bacon for example),--his error, I say, consisted in the notion, that because the stalk and foliage were originally contained in the seed, and were derived from it, therefore they remained so in point of right after their evolution. The kingly power was the seed; the House of Commons and the munic.i.p.al charters and privileges the stock of foliage; the unity of the realm, or what we mean by the const.i.tution, is the root. Meanwhile the seed is gone, and reappears as the crown and glorious flower of the plant. But James, in my honest judgment, was an angel compared with his son and grandsons. As Williams to Laud, so James I was to Charles I.

Ib.

Restraint is not a medicine to cure epidemical diseases.

A most judicious remark.

Ib. s. 103.

The least connivance in the world towards the person of a Papist.

It is clear to us that this illegal or 'praeter'-legal and desultory toleration by connivance at particular cases,--this precarious depending on the momentary mood of the King, and this in a stretch of a questioned prerogative,--could neither satisfy nor conciliate the Roman-Catholic potentates abroad, but was sure to offend and alarm the Protestants at home. Yet on the other hand, it is unfair as well as unwise to censure the men of an age for want of that which was above their age. The true principle, much more the practicable rules, of toleration were in James's time obscure to the wisest; but by the many, laity no less than clergy, would have been denounced as soul-murder and disguised atheism.

In fact--and a melancholy fact it is,--toleration then first becomes practicable when indifference has deprived it of all merit. In the same spirit I excuse the opposite party, the Puritans and Papaphobists.