done; and each Journalist, cleared of gall for several months, might return home in a more composed frame of mind, and betake himself with new alacrity to the real duties of his office. But enough! enough! The humour of these men may be infectious it is not good for us to be here. Wandering over the Elysian Fields of German Literature, not watching the gloomy discords of its Tartarus, is what we wish to be employed in. Let the iron gate again close, and shut-in the pallid kingdoms from view: we gladly revisit the upper air. Not in despite towards the German nation, which we love honestly, have we spoken thus of these its Playwrights and Journalists. Alas, when we look around us at home, we feel too well that the Germans might say to us: Neighbour, sweep thy own floor! Neither is it with any hope of bettering the existence of these three individual Poetasters, still less with the smallest shadow of wish to make it more miserable, that we have spoken. After all, there must be Playwrights, as we have said; and these are among the best of the class. So long as it pleases them to manufacture in this line, and any body of German Thebans to pay them in groschen or plaudits for their ware, let both parties persist in so doing, and fair befall them ! But the duty of Foreign Reviewers is of a twofold sort. For not only are we stationed on the coast of the country, as watchers and spials, to report whatsoever remarkable thing becomes visible in the distance; but we stand there also as a sort of Tide-waiters and Preventiveservice men, to contend, with our utmost vigour, that no improper article be landed. These offices, it would seem, as in the material world, so also in the literary and spiritual, usually fall to the lot of aged, invalided, impoverished, or otherwise decayed persons; but that is little to the matter. As true British subjects, with ready will, though it may be with our last strength, we are here to discharge that double duty. Movements, we observe, are making along the beach, and signals out seawards, as if these Klingemanns and Müllners were to be landed on our soil: but through the strength of heaven this shall not be done, till the most thinking people' know what it is that is landing. For the rest, if any one wishes to import that sort of produce, and finds it nourishing for his inward man, let him do so, and welcome. Only let him understand that it is not German Literature he is swallowing, but the froth and scum of German Literature; which scum, if he will only wait, we can farther promise him that he may, ere long, enjoy in the new, and perhaps cheaper form of sediment. And so let every one be active for himself: Noch ist es Tag, da rühre sich der Mann ; VOLTAIRE' COULD ambition always choose its own path, and were will in human undertakings synonymous with faculty, all truly ambitious men would be men of letters. Certainly, if we examine that love of power, which enters so largely into most practical calculations, nay, which our Utilitarian friends have recognised as the sole end and origin, both motive and reward, of all earthly enterprises, animating alike the philanthropist, the conqueror, the money-changer and the missionary, we shall find that all other arenas of ambition, compared with this rich and boundless one of Literature, meaning thereby whatever respects the promulgation of Thought, are poor, limited and ineffectual. For dull, unreflective, merely instinctive as the ordinary man may seem, he has nevertheless, as a quite indispensable appendage, a head that in some degree considers and computes; a lamp or rushlight of understanding has been given him, which, through whatever dim, besmoked and strangely diffractive media it may shine, is the ultimate guiding light of his whole path: and here as well as there, now as at all times in man's history, Opinion rules the world. Curious it is, moreover, to consider in this respect, how different appearance is from reality, and under what singular 1 FOREIGN REVIEW, No. 6.-Mémoires sur Voltaire et sur ses Ouvrages, par Longchamp et Wagnière, ses Secrétaires; suivis de divers Ecrits inédits de la Marquise du Châtelet, du Président Hénault, etc., tous relatifs à Voltaire. (Memoirs concerning Voltaire and his Works, by Longchamp and Wagnière, his Secretaries; with various unpublished Pieces by the Marquis du Châtelet, etc., all relating to Voltaire.) 2 tomes. Paris, 1826. shape and circumstances the truly most important man of any given period might be found. Could some Asmodeus, by simply waving his arm, open asunder the meaning of the Present, even so far as the Future will disclose it, what a much more marvellous sight should we have, than that mere bodily one through the roofs of Madrid! For we know not what we are, any more than what we shall be. It is a high, solemn, almost awful thought for every individual man, that his earthly influence, which has had a commencement, will never through all ages, were he the very meanest of us, have an end! What is done is done; has already blended itself with the boundless, ever-living, ever-working Universe, and will also work there, for good or for evil, openly or secretly, throughout all time. But the life of every man is as the wellspring of a stream, whose small beginnings are indeed plain to all, but whose ulterior course and destination, as it winds through the expanses of infinite years, only the Omniscient can discern. Will it mingle with neighbouring rivulets, as a tributary; or receive them as their sovereign ? Is it to be a nameless brook, and will its tiny waters, among millions of other brooks and rills, increase the current of some world-river? Or is it to be itself a Rhene or Danaw, whose goings-forth are to the uttermost lands, its flood an everlasting boundaryline on the globe itself, the bulwark and highway of whole kingdoms and continents? We know not; only in either case, we know, its path is to the great ocean; its waters, were they but a handful, are here, and cannot be annihilated or permanently held back. As little can we prognosticate, with any certainty, the future influences from the present aspects of an individual. How many Demagogues, Croesuses, Conquerors fill their own age with joy or terror, with a tumult that promises to be perennial; and in the next age die away into insignificance and oblivion! These are the forests of gourds, that overtop the infant cedars and aloe-trees, but, like the Prophet's gourd, wither on the third day. What was it to the Pharaohs of Egypt, in that old era, if Jethro the Midianitish priest and grazier accepted the Hebrew outlaw as his herdsman ? Yet the Pharaohs, with all their chariots of war, are buried deep in the wrecks of time; and that Moses still lives, not among his own tribe only, but in the hearts and daily business of all civilised nations. Or figure Mahomet, in his youthful years, travelling to the horse-fairs of Syria.' Nay, to take an infinitely higher instance: who has ever forgotten those lines of Tacitus; inserted as a small, transitory, altogether trifling circumstance in the history of such a potentate as Nero ? To us it is the most earnest, sad and sternly significant passage that we know to exist in writing: Ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos, et quæsitissimis pœnis affecit, quos per flagitia invisos, vulgus CHRISTIANOS appellabat. Auctor nominis ejus CHRISTUS, qui, Tiberio imperitante, per Procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio affectus erat. Repressaque in præsens exitiabilis superstitio rursus erumpebat, non modo per Judæam originem ejus mali, sed per urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque. So, for the quieting of this rumour, Nero judicially charged with the crime, and punished with most studied severities, that class, hated for their general wickedness, whom the vulgar called Christians. The originator of that name was one Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered death by sentence of the Procurator, Pontius Pilate. The baneful superstition, thereby repressed for the time, again broke out, not only over Judea, the native soil of that mischief, but in the City also, where from every side all atrocious and abominable things collect and flourish.'2 Tacitus was the wisest, most penetrating man of his generation; and to such depth, and no deeper, has he seen into this transaction, the most important that has occurred or can occur in the annals of mankind. Nor is it only to those primitive ages, when religions took their rise, and a man of pure and high mind appeared not 1 Of his having set fire to Rome. 2 Tacit. Annal. xv. 44. |