Curiosities of Literature Volume Iii Part 43

Cromwell's hunting them out of the House by military force is alluded to--

Our politic doctors do us teach, That a blood-sucking red-coat's as good as a leech To relieve the head, if applied to the breech.

In the opening scene of the Restoration, Mrs. Hutchinson, an honest republican, paints with dismay a scene otherwise very ludicrous. "When the town of Nottingham, as almost all the rest of the island, began to grow mad, and declared themselves in their desires of the king;" or, as another of the opposite party writes, "When the soldiery, who had hitherto made _clubs trumps_, resolved now to turn up the _king of hearts_ in their affections," the rabble in town and country vied with each other in burning the "Rump;" and the literal emblem was hung by chains on gallowses, with a bonfire underneath, while the cries of "Let us burn the Rump! Let us roast the Rump!" were echoed everywhere. The suddenness of this universal change, which was said to have maddened the wise, and to have sobered the mad, must be ascribed to the joy at escaping from the yoke of a military despotism; perhaps, too, it marked the rapid transition of hope to a restoration which might be supposed to have implanted grat.i.tude even in a royal breast! The feelings of the people expected to find an echo from the throne!

"The Rump," besides their general resemblance to the French anarchists, had also some minuter features of ugliness, which Englishmen have often exulted have not marked an English revolution--sanguinary proscriptions![328] We had thought that we had no revolutionary tribunals! no Septembrisers! no noyades! no moveable guillotines awaiting for carts loaded with human victims! no infuriated republican urging, in a committee of public safety, the necessity of a salutary ma.s.sacre!

But if it be true that the same motives and the same principles were at work in both nations, and that the like characters were performing in England the parts which they did afterwards in France, by an argument _a priori_ we might be sure that the same revolting crimes and chimerical projects were alike suggested at London as at Paris. Human nature, even in transactions which appear unparalleled, will be found to preserve a regularity of resemblance not always suspected.

The first great tragic act was closely copied by the French: and if the popular page of our history appears unstained by their revolutionary axe, this depended only on a slight accident; for it became a question of "yea" and "nay!" and was only carried in the negative by _two voices_ in the council! It was debated among "the b.l.o.o.d.y Rump," as it was hideously designated, "whether to ma.s.sacre and to put to the sword _all the king's party_!"[329] Cromwell himself listened to the suggestion; and it was only put down by the coolness of political calculation--the dread that the ma.s.sacre would be _too general_! Some of the Rump not obtaining the blessedness of a ma.s.sacre, still clung to the happiness of an immolation; and many pet.i.tions were presented, that "_two or three princ.i.p.al gentlemen_ of the royal party in EACH COUNTY might be sacrificed to justice, whereby the land might be saved from _blood-guiltiness_!" Sir Arthur Haslerigg, whose "pa.s.sionate fondness of liberty" has been commended,[330] was one of the committee of safety in 1647--I too would commend "a pa.s.sionate lover of liberty," whenever I do not discover that this lover is much more intent on the dower than on the bride. Haslerigg, "an absurd, bold man," as Clarendon, at a single stroke, reveals his character, was resolved not to be troubled with king or bishop, or with any power in the state superior to "the Rump's." We may safely suspect the patriot who can cool his vehemence in spoliation.

Haslerigg would have no bishops, but this was not from any want of reverence for church lands, for he heaped for himself such wealth as to have been nicknamed "the Bishop of Durham!" He is here noticed for a political crime different from that of plunder. When, in 1647, this venerable radical found the parliament resisting his views, he declared that "Some heads must fly off!" adding, "the parliament cannot save England; we must look another way;"--threatening, what afterwards was done, to bring in the army! It was this "pa.s.sionate lover of liberty"

who, when Dorislaus, the parliamentary agent, was a.s.sa.s.sinated by some Scotchmen in Holland, moved in the house, that "six royalists of the best quality" should be immediately executed! When some northern counties pet.i.tioned the Commons for relief against a famine in the land, our Maratist observed, that "this _want of food_ would best defend those counties from Scottish invasion!"[331] The slaughter of Drogheda by Cromwell, and his frightening all London by what Walker calls "a butchery of apprentices," when he cried out to his soldiers, "to kill man, woman, and child, and fire the city!"[332] may be placed among those crimes which are committed to open a reign of terror--but Hugh Peters's solemn thanksgiving to Heaven that "none were spared!" was the true expression of the true feeling of these political demoniacs.

Cromwell was cruel from politics, others from const.i.tution. Some were willing to be cruel without "blood-guiltiness." One Alexander Rigby, a radical lawyer, twice moved in the Long Parliament, that those _lords and gentlemen_ who were "malignants," should be _sold as slaves to the Dey of Algiers_, or sent off to the new plantations in the West Indies.

He had all things prepared; for it is added that he had contracted with two merchants to s.h.i.+p them off.[333] There was a most b.l.o.o.d.y-minded "maker of was.h.i.+ng-b.a.l.l.s," as one John Durant is described, appointed a lecturer by the House of Commons, who always left out of the Lord's Prayer, "As we forgive them that trespa.s.s against us," and subst.i.tuted, "Lord, since thou hast now drawn out thy sword, let it not be sheathed again till it be glutted in the blood of the malignants." I find too many enormities of this kind. "Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord negligently, and keepeth back his sword from blood!" was the cry of the wretch, who, when a celebrated actor and royalist sued for quarter, gave no other reply than that of "fitting the action to the word."[334]

Their treatment of the Irish may possibly be admired by a true Machiavelist: "they permitted forty thousand of the Irish to enlist in the service of the kings of Spain and France"--in other words, they expelled them at once, which, considering that our Rumpers affected such an abhorrence of tyranny, may be considered as an act of mercy!

satisfying themselves only with dividing the forfeited lands of the aforesaid forty thousand among their own party, by lot and other means.

An universal confiscation, after all, is a bloodless ma.s.sacre. They used the Scotch soldiers, after the battles of Dunbar and Worcester, a little differently--but equally efficaciously--for they sold their Scotch prisoners for slaves to the American planters.[335]

The Robespierres and the Marats were as extraordinary beings, and in some respects the Frenchmen were working on a more enlarged scheme.

These discovered that "the generation which had witnessed the preceding one would always regret it; and for the security of the Revolution, it was necessary that every person who was thirty years old in 1788 should perish on the scaffold!" The anarchists were intent on reducing the French people to eight millions, and on destroying the great cities of France.[336]

Such monstrous persons and events are not credible--but this is no proof that they have not occurred. Many incredible things will happen!

Another disorganising feature in the English _Rumpers_ was also observed in the French _Sans-culottes_--their hatred of literature and the arts.

Hebert was one day directing his satellites towards the _Bibliotheque Nationale_, to put an end to all that human knowledge had collected for centuries on centuries--in one day! alleging, of course, some good reason. This hero was only diverted from the enterprise by being persuaded to postpone it for a day or two, when luckily the guillotine intervened; the same circ.u.mstance occurred here. The burning of the records in the Tower was certainly proposed; a speech of Selden's, which I cannot immediately turn to, put a stop to these incendiaries. It was debated in the Rump parliament, when Cromwell was general, whether they should _dissolve the universities_? They concluded that no university was necessary; that there were no ancient examples of such education, and that scholars in other countries did study at _their own cost and charges_, and therefore they looked on them as unnecessary, and thought them fitting _to be taken away for the public use_!--How these venerable asylums escaped from being sold with the king's pictures, as stone and timber, and why their rich endowments were not shared among such inveterate ignorance and remorseless spoliation, might claim some inquiry.

The Abbe Morellet, a great political economist, imagined that the source of all the crimes of the French Revolution was their violation of the sacred rights of property. The perpetual invectives of the _Sans-culottes_ of France _against proprietors and against property_ proceeded from demoralised beings who formed panegyrics on all crimes; crimes, to explain whose revolutionary terms, a new dictionary was required. But even these anarchists, in their mad expressions against property, and in their wildest notions of their "egalite," have not gone beyond the daring of our own "Rumpers!"

Of those revolutionary journals of the parliament of 1649, which in spirit so strongly resemble the diurnal or hebdomadal effusions of the redoubtable French Hebert, Marat, and others of that stamp, one of the most remarkable is, "The Moderate, impartially communicating Martial Affairs to the _Kingdom_ of England;" the monarchical t.i.tle our commonwealth men had not yet had time enough to obliterate from their colloquial style. This writer called himself, in his barbarous English, _The Moderate_! It would be hard to conceive the meanness and illiteracy to which the English language was reduced under the pens of the rabble-writers of these days, had we not witnessed in the present time a parallel to their compositions. "The Moderate!" was a t.i.tle a.s.sumed on the principle on which Marat denominated himself "l'Ami du Peuple." It is curious that the most ferocious politicians usually a.s.sert their moderation. Robespierre, in his justification, declares that Marat "m'a souvent accuse de _Moderantisme_." The same actors, playing the same parts, may be always paralleled in their language and their deeds. This "Moderate" steadily pursued one great principle--the overthrow of all property. a.s.suming that _property_ was the original cause of _sin_! an exhortation to the people for this purpose is the subject of the present paper:[337] the ill.u.s.tration of his principle is as striking as the principle itself.

It is an apology for, or rather a defence of, robbery! Some moss-troopers had been condemned to be hanged for practising their venerable custom of gratuitously supplying themselves from the flocks and herds of their weaker neighbours: our "Moderate" ingeniously discovers that the loss of these men's lives is to be attributed to nothing but _property_. They are necessitated to offend the laws in order to obtain a livelihood!

On this he descants; and the extract is a political curiosity in the French style! "_Property_ is the original cause of any _sin_ between party and party as to civil transactions. And since the _tyrant_ is taken off, and the government altered _in nomine_, so ought it really to redound to the good of the people _in specie_; which, though they cannot expect it in few years, by reason of _the multiplicity of the gentlemen in authority_, command, &c. who drive on all designs for support of the old government, and consequently their own interest and the _people's slavery_, yet they doubt not but _in time_ the people will herein discern their own blindness and folly."

In September, he advanced with more depth of thought. "_Wars_ have ever been clothed with the most gracious pretences--viz., reformation of religion, the laws of the land, the liberty of the subject, &c.; though the effects thereof have proved most destructive to every nation; making the sword, and not _the people_, the original of all authorities for many hundred years together, taking away _each man's birthright_, and _settling upon a few_ A CURSED PROPRIETY; the ground of all civil offences, and the greatest cause of most sins against the heavenly Deity. _This tyranny and oppression_ running through the veins of many of our predecessors, and being too long maintained by the sword upon a royal foundation, at last became so customary, as _to the vulgar it seemed most natural_--the only reason why the _people_ of this time are so _ignorant of their birthright_, their only freedom," &c.

"The birthright" of citoyen _Egalite_ to "_a cursed propriety settled on a few_," was not, even among the French Jacobins, urged with more amazing force. Had things proceeded according to our "Moderate's" plan, "the people's slavery" had been something worse. In a short time the nation would have had more proprietors than property. We have a curious list of the spoliations of those members of the House of Commons, who, after their famous _self-denying ordinances_, appropriated among themselves sums of money, offices, and lands, for services "done or to be done."

The most innocent of this new government of "the Majesty of the People,"

were those whose talents had been limited by Nature to peddle and purloin; puny mechanics, who had suddenly dropped their needles, their hammers, and their lasts, and slunk out from behind their shop-counters; those who had never aspired beyond the constable of the parish, were now seated in the council of state; where, as Milton describes them, "they fell to huckster the commonwealth:" there they met a more rabid race of obscure lawyers, and discontented men of family, of blasted reputations; adventurers, who were to command the militia and navy of England,--governors of the three kingdoms! whose votes and ordinances resounded with nothing else but new impositions, new taxes, excises, yearly, monthly, weekly sequestrations, compositions, and universal robbery!

Baxter vents one deep groan of indignation, and presciently announces one future consequence of _Reform_! "In all this appeared the severity of G.o.d, the mutability of worldly things, and the fruits of error, pride, and selfishness, _to be charged hereafter upon reformation and religion_." As a statesman, the sagacity of this honest prophet was narrowed by the horizon of his religious views; for he ascribes the whole as "prepared by Satan to the injury of the Protestant cause, and the advantage of the Papists!" But dropping his particular application to the devil and the Papists, honest Richard Baxter is perfectly right in his general principle concerning "Rumpers,"--"Sans-culottes," and "Radicals."

FOOTNOTES:

[325] History of Independency, Part II. p. 32.

[326] First collected and published in 1661, and afterwards reprinted in two small vols. 1731.

[327] The first collection ever formed of these political satires was printed in 1660, with the quaint t.i.tle of "Ratts rhimed to Death; or, the Rump-parliament hang'd up in the Shambles."

[328] In one of the popular political songs of the day, "The Rump"

is aptly compared to

"The foxes of Samson, that carried a brand In their tails, to destroy and to burn up the land."

[329] Clement Walker's History of Independency, part II. p. 130.

Confirmed by Barwick in his Life, p. 163.

[330] The Rev. Mark n.o.ble's Memoirs of the Protectoral House of Cromwell, i. 405.

[331] Clement Walker's History of Independency, Part II. 173.

[332] Ib., Part I. 160.

[333] Mercurius Rusticus, xii. 115. Barwick's Life, p. 42.

[334] This actor was a comedian named Robinson, of the Blackfriars Theatre; the performers there being termed "the king's servants." In the civil wars most of the young actors, deprived of living by their profession, all theatres being closed by order of the Parliament, went into the king's army. Robinson was fighting at the siege of Basing House, in Hamps.h.i.+re, October, 1645, when after an obstinate defence his party was defeated, he laid down his arms, suing for quarter, but was shot through the head by Colonel Harrison, as he repeated the words quoted above.

[335] The following account is drawn from Sir William Dugdale's interleaved Pocket-book for 1648.--"Aug. 17. The Scotch army, under the command of Duke Hamilton, defeated at Preston in Lancas.h.i.+re.

24th. The Moorlanders rose upon the Scots and stript some of them.

The Scotch prisoners miserably used; exposed to eat cabbage-leaves in Ridgley (Staffords.h.i.+re), and carrot-tops in Coles.h.i.+ll (Warwicks.h.i.+re). The soldiers who guarded them sold the victuals which were brought in for them from the country."

[336] Desodoard's Histoire Philosophique de la Revolution de France, iv. 5. When Lyons was captured in 1793, the revolutionary army nearly reduced this fine city to a heap of ruins, in obedience to the decree of the Montagne, who had ordered its name to be effaced, that it should henceforth be termed, "Commune affranchie," and upon its ruins a column erected and inscribed, "Lyon fit la guerre a la liberte; Lyon n'est plus."

[337] The _Moderate_, from Tuesday, July 31, to August 7, 1649.

LIFE AND HABITS OF A LITERARY ANTIQUARY.--OLDYS AND HIS Ma.n.u.sCRIPTS.

Such a picture may be furnished by some unexpected materials which my inquiries have obtained of Oldys. This is a sort of personage little known to the wits, who write more than they read, and to their volatile votaries, who only read what the wits write. It is time to vindicate the honours of the few whose laborious days enrich the stores of national literature, not by the duplicates but the supplements of knowledge. A literary antiquary is that idler whose life is pa.s.sed in a perpetual _voyage autour de ma chambre_; fervent in sagacious diligence, instinct with the enthusiasm of curious inquiry, critical as well as erudite; he has to arbitrate between contending opinions, to resolve the doubtful, to clear up the obscure, and to grasp at the remote; so busied with other times, and so interested for other persons than those about him, that he becomes the inhabitant of the visionary world of books. He counts only his days by his acquisitions, and may be said by his original discoveries to be the CREATOR OF FACTS; often exciting the grat.i.tude of the literary world, while the very name of the benefactor has not always descended with the inestimable labours.

Such is the man whom we often find leaving, when he dies, his favourite volumes only an incomplete project! and few of this cla.s.s of literary men have escaped the fate reserved for most of their brothers.

Voluminous works have been usually left unfinished by the death of the authors; and it is with them as with the planting of trees, of which Johnson has forcibly observed, "There is a frightful interval between the seed and timber." And he admirably remarks, what I cannot forbear applying to the labours I am now to describe: "He that calculates the growth of trees has the remembrance of the shortness of life driven hard upon him. He knows that he is doing what will never benefit himself; and where he rejoices to see the stem rise, is disposed to repine that another shall cut it down." The days of the patriotic Count Mazzuch.e.l.li were freely given to his national literature; and six invaluable folios attest the gigantic force of his immense erudition; yet these only carry us through the letters A and B: and though Mazzuch.e.l.li had finished for the press other volumes, the torpor of his descendants has defrauded Europe of her claims.[338] The Abbe Goujet, who had designed a cla.s.sified history of his national literature, in the eighteen volumes we possess, could only conclude that of the translators, and commence that of the poets; two other volumes in ma.n.u.script have perished. That great enterprise of the Benedictines, the "Histoire Literaire de la France," now consists of twelve large quartos, and the industry of its successive writers has only been able to carry it to the twelfth century. David Clement designed the most extensive bibliography which had ever appeared; but the diligent life of the writer could only proceed as far as H. The alphabetical order, which so many writers of this cla.s.s have adopted, has proved a mortifying memento of human life!

Tiraboschi was so fortunate as to complete his great national history of Italian literature. But, unhappily for us, Thomas Warton, after feeling his way through the darker ages of our poetry, in planning the map of the beautiful land, of which he had only a Pisgah-sight, expired amidst his volumes. The most precious portion of Warton's history is but the fragment of a fragment.

Oldys, among this brotherhood, has met perhaps with a harder fate; his published works, and the numerous ones to which he contributed, are now highly appreciated by the lovers of books; but the larger portion of his literary labours have met with the sad fortune of dispersed, and probably of wasted ma.n.u.scripts. Oldys's ma.n.u.scripts, or O. M. as they are sometimes designated, are constantly referred to by every distinguished writer on our literary history. I believe that not one of them could have given us any positive account of the ma.n.u.scripts themselves! They have indeed long served as the solitary sources of information--but like the well at the wayside, too many have drawn their waters in silence.

Oldys is chiefly known by the caricature of the facetious Grose; a great humourist, both with pencil and with pen: it is in a posthumous sc.r.a.p-book, where Grose deposited his odds and ends, and where there is perhaps not a single story which is not satirical. Our lively antiquary, who cared more for rusty armour than for rusty volumes, would turn over these flams and quips to some confidential friend, to enjoy together a secret laugh at their literary intimates. His eager executor, who happened to be his bookseller, served up the poignant hash to the public as "Grose's Olio!"[339] The delineation of Oldys is sufficiently overcharged for "the nonce." One prevalent infirmity of honest Oldys, his love of companions.h.i.+p over too social a gla.s.s, sends him down to posterity in a grotesque att.i.tude; and Mr. Alexander Chalmers, who has given us the fullest account of Oldys, has inflicted on him something like a sermon, on "a state of intoxication."

Alas! Oldys was an outcast of fortune,[340] and the utter simplicity of his heart was guileless as a child's--ever open to the designing. The n.o.ble spirit of a Duke of Norfolk once rescued the long-lost historian of Rawleigh from the confinement of the Fleet, where he had existed, probably forgotten by the world, for six years. It was by an act of grace that the duke safely placed Oldys in the Heralds' College as Norroy King of Arms.[341] But Oldys, like all shy and retired men, had contracted peculiar habits and close attachments for a few; both these he could indulge at no distance. He liked his old a.s.sociates in the purlieus of the Fleet, whom he facetiously dignified as "his Rulers,"

and there, as I have heard, with the grotesque whim of a herald, established "The Dragon Club." Companions.h.i.+p yields the poor man unpurchased pleasures. Oldys, busied every morning among the departed wits and the learned of our country, reflected some image from them of their wit and learning to his companions: a secret history as yet untold, and ancient wit, which, cleared of the rust, seemed to him brilliant as the modern!

It is hard, however, for a literary antiquary to be caricatured, and for a herald to be ridiculed about an "unseemly reeling with the coronet of the Princess Caroline, which looked unsteady on the cus.h.i.+on, to the great scandal of his brethren,"--a circ.u.mstance which could never have occurred at the burial of a prince or princess, as the coronet is carried by Clarencieux, and not by Norroy. Oldys's deep potations of ale, however, give me an opportunity of bestowing on him the honour of being the author of a popular Anacreontic song. Mr. Taylor informs me that "Oldys always a.s.serted that he was the author of the well-known song--