Amenities of Literature Part 59

[3] Every atom of candour is to be grudged to this hapless monarch; it is lamentable to see such a writer as Mr. Hallam prompt instantly to confirm a mere suggestion of Mr. Collier, that James could never have written a letter to Shakespeare, incapacitated to sympathize with the genial effusions of our poet.

THE AGE OF DOCTRINES.

We now leave the age of Imagination for the age of Doctrines; we have entered into another reign; and, a new epoch arises in our Literature, our tastes, and our manners.

We turn from the n.o.ble wrestlings of power, the stirrings of adventure, and the commanding genius of the Maiden Queen, to the uninterrupted level of a long protracted tranquillity; a fat soil, where all flourished to the eye, while it grew into rankness, and an atmosphere of corruption; breeding, in its unnatural heat, clouds of insects. A monarch arrived in the flush of new dominion with a small people, who, as an honest soul among them said, "having been forty years in the desert, were rus.h.i.+ng to take possession of the promised land." All was to be the festival of an unbroken repose--a court of shows and sports, the rejoicings of three kingdoms.

But the queen, with these dominions, had bequeathed her successor two troublesome legacies, in two redoubtable portions of the English public; both the Romanists, and those numerous dissenters, emphatically called Puritans, were looking up to the new monarch, while the "true protestants of Elizabeth" closed not their eyes in watchfulness over both papist and presbyter.

To the monarch from the Kirk of Scotland, which he had extolled for "the sincerest Kirk in the world," as suited a Scottish sovereign, and who had once glanced with a presbyter's eye on "an evil ma.s.s in England,"

the English bishops hastened to offer the loyalty of their church. His more ancient acquaintance, the puritans, were not behind the bishops, nor without hope, to settle what they held to be "the purity" of church discipline; but James had drunk large draughts of a Scottish presbytery, and knew what lay at the bottom--he had tasted the dregs. He did not like the puritans, and he told them why; to unking and to unbishop was "the parity" of their petty model of Geneva. The new monarch declared, perhaps he would not otherwise have been received, that "he came to maintain what the queen had established,"--he demanded from the puritans conformity to the State, and probably little imagined that they preferred martyrdom. James lived to see the day when silencing, ejecting, and expatiating, ended in no other conformity than the common sufferings of the party.[1]

The claims of the Romanists were more tender than those of the sons of John Knox; they prayed only for a toleration. The monarch, delayed what he dared not concede. He is charged by the non-conformist with being "very charitable" to these votaries of an indefeasible right of monarchy, and his project of "meeting them half-way" startled the English protestant. What does the king mean? Are our doctrines the same?

are we to return to the confessional? purchase plenary pardons? require absolution and the salvation of souls from the bishop of Rome?

The main objection of the king himself to what he styled "the corruption of the mother-church," was the papal supremacy, and its pretended power of deposing monarchs, or of granting a dispensation for their murder.

Here the popular patriot exclaimed, "Was the great revolution of civil liberty made only for the prince's safety?" Whatever might be this reverie of a coalition with Rome, Rome for ever baffled it, by the never-ceasing principle of her one and indivisible divine autocracy.

"The celestial court," omnipotent and omniscient, hurled its bolt at the pacific heretic of England. It menaced his t.i.tle, 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 promulgators of the emanc.i.p.ation of mankind;[2] nor is it remotely connected with the n.o.ble genius of Paul Sarpi, whose great work was first published in London, and patronized by the English monarch.

It was on a nation divided into unequal parts of irreconcileable 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 aeneas brandished his weapon, but could never wound the flitting chimeras. It was in the spirit of the age that Dr. Sutcliffe, 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 inst.i.tution the provost and the fellows were unceasingly to answer the Romanist and the Mar-Prelate. The fervent dean sc.r.a.ped 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 those 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 who 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 apprentices.h.i.+p of royalty, and with the doctrines of the Anglican Church become the sovereign of three realms, did James, like his brother of France, modify his creed, for a crown, by the state-religion?

Behold this luckless philosopher on the throne closing the last accompts of his royalty with nothing but zeros in his own favour. 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?[3]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] James granted to the Puritans the public discussion then prayed for--the famous conference at Hampton Court.

[2] 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.

[3] I have at least honestly attempted "An Inquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First."

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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sions, 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 neighbours in their great revolutionary agitation, if they could not comprehend our const.i.tution, 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 favourite side, finds enough written with his own pa.s.sions, but he will obtain little extension of knowledge, for this is much like looking at his own face in the gla.s.s.

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 which was taken on novel objects of discovery would be wholly lost were it not for these records; and, indeed, it is the multiplicity of pamphlets on a particular topic or object which appear at a particular period, that offer the truest picture of public opinion.

Those who would not dare to compose a volume have fluttered in the leaves of a pamphlet. Three or four ideas are a good stock to set up a pamphlet, and look well in it, as picked wares in a shop-window. The mute who cannot speak at a dinner or on the hustings, is eloquent in a pamphlet; and he who speaks only to excite the murmurs of his auditors, amply vindicates himself by a pamphlet. I doubt whether there is a single important subject to which some English pamphlet may not form a necessary supplement. Many eminent in rank, or who, from their position, have never written anything else, have written a pamphlet; and as the motive must he urgent which induces any such to have recourse to their pen, so the matter is of deeper interest; and it has often happened that the public have thence derived information which else had not reached them. The heads of parties have sometimes issued these manifestoes; and the tails, in the form of a pamphlet, have sometimes let out secrets for which they have been reprimanded.

Some of the most original conceptions, whose very errors or peculiarities even may instruct, lie hidden in pamphlets. These effusions of a more permanent nature than those of politics, are usually literary, scientific, or artistical, the spontaneous productions of amateurs, the precious suggestions, and sometimes the original discoveries of taste or enthusiasm. These are the _deliciae_ of the amenities of literature; and such pamphlets have often escaped our notice, since their writers were not authors, and had no works of their own among which to shelter them.

The age of Charles the First may be characterised as the age of pamphlets. Of that remarkable period, we possess an extraordinary collection, which amounts to about thirty thousand pieces, uniformly bound in two thousand volumes of various sizes, accompanied by twelve folio volumes of the catalogue chronologically arranged, exhibiting their full t.i.tles. Even the date of the day is noted when each pamphlet was published. It includes a hundred in ma.n.u.script written on the king's side, which at the time were not allowed to be printed. The formation of this collection is a romantic incident in the annals of Bibliography.

In that critical year, 1640, a bookseller of the name of Thomason conceived the idea of preserving, in that new age of contested principles, an unbroken chain of men's arguments, and men's doings. We may suppose that this collector, commencing with the year 1640, and continuing without omission or interruption to the year 1660, could not at first have imagined the vast career he had to run; there was, perhaps, sagacity in the first thought, but there was far more intrepidity in never relinquis.h.i.+ng this favourite object during these perilous twenty years, amid a conflict of costly expenditure, of personal danger, and almost insurmountable difficulties.

The design was carried on in secrecy through confidential servants, who at first buried the volumes as they collected them; but they soon became too numerous for such a mode of concealment. The owner, dreading that the ruling government would seize on the collection, watched the movements of the army of the Commonwealth, and carried this itinerant library in every opposite direction. Many were its removals, northward or westward, but the danger became so great, and the collection so bulky, that he had at one time an intention to pa.s.s them over into Holland, but feared to trust his treasure to the waves. He at length determined to place them in his warehouses, in the form of tables round the room, covered with canvas. It is evident that the loyalty of the man had rendered him a suspected person; for he was once dragged from his bed, and imprisoned for seven weeks, during which time, however, the collection suffered no interruption, nor was the secret betrayed.

The secret was, however, evidently not unknown to some faithful servants of the king; for when, in 1647, his Majesty at Hampton Court desired to see a particular pamphlet, it was obtained for him from this collection, though the collector was somewhat chary of the loan, fearing the loss of what he felt as a limb of his body, not probably recoverable. The king had the volume with him in his flight towards the Isle of Wight; but it was returned to the owner, with his Majesty's earnest exhortation, that he should diligently continue the collection. A slight accident which happened to the volume occasioned the collector to leave this interesting incident on record.[1]

When Cromwell ruled, a place of greater security was sought for than the owner's warehouses: a fict.i.tious sale was made to the University of Oxford, who would be more able to struggle for their preservation than a private individual, if the Protector discovered and claimed these distracted doc.u.ments of the history of his own times.

Mr. Thomason lived to complete his design; he witnessed the restoration, and died in 1666, leaving his important collection, which was still lodged at Oxford, and which he describes in his will "as not to be paralleled," in trust to be sold for the benefit of his children. His will affords an evidence that he was a person of warm patriotic feelings, with a singular turn of mind, for he left a stipend of forty s.h.i.+llings for two sermons to be annually preached, one of which was to commemorate the destruction of the Armada.

The collection continued at Oxford many years awaiting a purchaser;[2]

and at length appears to have been bought by Mearne, "the king's stationer," at the command of the Secretary of State for Charles the Second; but Charles, who would little value old pamphlets, and more particularly these, which only reminded him of such mortifying occurrences, by an order in council in 1684 munificently allowed the widow of Mearne to dispose of them as well as she could. In 1709 we find them offered to Lord Weymouth,[3] and in 1732 they were still undisposed of; but in those times of loyal rebellion, either for the a.s.sumption or the restoration of the throne, that of the Commonwealth excited so little interest, and this extraordinary collection was so depreciated, that Oldys then considered it would not reach the twentieth part of the four thousand pounds which it was said that the collector had once refused for it.[4] In 1745 a representative of the Mearne family still held the volumes,[5] and eventually they were purchased at the small price of three or four hundred pounds by George the Third, and by him were presented to the national library, where they now bear the name of the King's Pamphlets.

Thus having escaped from seizure and dispersion, this n.o.ble collection remained in the hands of those who priced it as a valueless inc.u.mbrance, and yet seem to have respected the object of the enterprise, for they preserved it entire. It may be some consolation to such intrepid collectors that their intelligence and their fervour are not in vain, and however they may fail in the attainment of their motive, a great end may fortunately be achieved.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In vol. 100, small quarto, we find the following memorandum:--

"Mem'dum that Col^l Will Legg and Mr. Arthur Treavor were employed by his Majes^e K. Ch. to gett for his present use a pamphl^t which his majestie had then occasion to make use of, & not meeting with it, they both come to me, having heard that I did employ myself to rake up all such things from the beginning of that Parliament, and finding it with me, told me it was for his majestys own use. I told them all I had were at his maj^y command and service, & withal told them if I should part with it & loose it--presuming that when his majestie had done with it, that little account would be made of it, and that if I should loose it, by that loss a limb of my collection, which I should be very loath to see, well knowing it would be impossible to supplie it if it should happen to be lost; with which answer they returned to his majes^e at Hampton C^t (as I take it) & tould him they had found the person which had it, & withal how loath he that had it was to part with it, he much fearing its loss. Whereupon they came to me again from his maj^e to tell me that upon the word of a king (to use the king's own expressions) they would safely return it, whereupon immediately by them I sent it to his majestie. Who having done with it, & having it with him when he was going towards the Isle of Wight, let it fall in the _durt_, and then calling for the two persons (who attended him) delivered it to them with a charge as they would answer it another day, that they should both speedily & safely return it to him from whom they had received it, and withal to desire the party to go on & continue what had begun. Which book, together with his Maj^ties signification to me, by these worthy and faithful gents, I received both speedily and safely. My volume hath that mark of honour which no other volume in my collection hath, & v^y diligently and carefully I continued the same until that most hapie restoration & coronation of his most gratious majestie King Charle y^e 2d, whom G.o.d long preserve.

"GEO. THOMASON."

The volume bears the "honours" of its mischance. There are a great number of stains on the edges of the leaves--some more than an inch in depth. The accident must have happened on the road in the king's flight, from the marks of the mud.

[2] In 1676, Dr. Barlow, one of the trustees, writes to the Rev.

George Thomason, who was a Fellow of Queen's College and the eldest son of the collector, respecting the collection and its value. The letter is printed in Beloe's "Anecdotes of Literature," vol. ii.