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the name of politeness; though they are the real offspring of barbarism, and the effects of degeneracy both in taste and manners. In his political letters, all his maxims are drawn from an intimate knowledge of men and things: he always touches the point on which the affair turns; foresees the danger, and foretells the mischief, which never failed to follow upon the neglect of his counsels; of which there were so many instances, that, as an eminent writer of his own time observed to him, his prudence seemed to be a kind of divination, which foretold every thing that afterwards happened, with the veracity of a prophet. But none of his letters do him more credit than those of the recommendatory kind: the others shew his wit and his parts, these his benevolence and his probity: he solicits the interest of his friends, with all the warmth and force of words of which he was master; and alleges generally some personal reason for his peculiar zeal in the cause, and that his own honour was concerned in the success of it.

But his letters are not more valuable on any account, than for their being the only monuments of that sort, which remain to us from free Rome. They breathe the last words of expiring liberty; a great part of them having been written in the very crisis of its ruin, to rouse up all the virtue that was left in the honest and the brave, to the defence of their country. The advantage which they derive from this circumstance, will easily be observed by comparing them with the epistles of the best and greatest, who flourished afterwards in Imperial Rome. Pliny's letters are justly admired by men of taste: they shew the scholar, the wit, the fine gentleman; yet we cannot but observe a poverty and barrenness through the whole, that betrays the awe of a master. All his stories and reflections terminate in private life; there is nothing important in politics; no great affairs explained; no account of the motives of public counsels; he had borne all the same offices with Cicero, whom in all points he affected to emulate; yet his honours were in effect nominal, conferred by a superior power, and administered by a superior will; and with the old titles of consul and proconsul, we want still the statesman, the politician, and the magistrate. In his provincial command, where Cicero governed all things with supreme authority, and had kings attendant on his

orders, Pliny durst not venture to repair a bath, or to punish a fugitive slave, or incorporate a company of masons, till he had first consulted and obtained the leave of Trajan.

His historical works are all lost: the Commentaries of his Consulship in Greek; the History of his own Affairs, to his return from exile, in Latin verse; and his Anecdotes; as well as the pieces that he published on Natural History, of which Pliny quotes one upon the Wonders of Nature, and another on Perfumes. He was meditating likewise a general History of Rome, to which he was frequently urged by his friends, as the only man capable of adding that glory also to his country, of excelling the Greeks in a species of writing, which of all others was at that time the least cultivated by the Romans. But he never found leisure to execute so great a task; yet he has sketched out a plan of it, which, short as it is, seems to be the best that can be formed for the design of a perfect history.

He declares it to be" the first and "fundamental law of history, that it "should neither dare to say any thing that was false, or fear to say any thing that

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was true, nor give any just suspicion ei"ther of favour or disaffection; that in the "relation of things, the writer should ob

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serve the order of time, and add also "the description of places: that in all "great and memorable transactions, he "should first explain the counsels, then "the acts, lastly the events; that in coun"sels he should interpose his own judg"ment on the merit of them; in the acts, "should relate not only what was done, "but how it was done; in the events, "should shew what share chance, or rash

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ness, or prudence had in them; that in "regard to persons, he should describe "not only their particular actions, but the "lives and characters of all those who "bear an eminent part in the story; that "he should illustrate the whole in a clear, "easy, natural style, flowing with a per"petual smoothness and equability, free "from the affectation of points and sen"tences, or the roughness of judicial "pleadings."

Poetry was the amusement only, and relief of his other studies; eloquence was his distinguished talent, his sovereign attribute to this he devoted all the faculties of his soul, and attained to a degree of perfection in it, that no mortal ever

surpassed; so that, as a polite historian observes, Rome had but few orators before him, whom it could praise; none whom it could admire. Demosthenes was the pattern by which he formed himself; whom he emulated with such success, as to merit what St. Jerome calls that beautiful eloge: Demosthenes has snatched from thee the glory of being the first; thou from Demosthenes, that of being the only orator. The genius, the capacity, the style and manner of them both, were much the same; their eloquence of that great, sublime, and comprehensive kind which dignified every subject, and gave it all the force and beauty of which it was capable; it was that roundness of speaking, as the ancients call it, where there was nothing either redundant or deficient ; nothing either to be added or retrenched : their perfections were in all points so transcendant, and yet so similar, that the critics are not agreed on which side to give the preference. Quinctilian indeed, the most judicious of them, has given it on the whole to Cicero; but if, as others have thought, Cicero had not all the nerve, the energy, or, as he himself calls it, the thunder of Demosthenes, he excelled him in the copiousness and elegance of his diction, the variety of his sentiments, and, above all, in the vivacity of his wit, and smartness of his raillery. Demosthenes had nothing jocose or facetious in him; yet, by attempting sometimes to jest, shewed, that the thing itself did not displease, but did not belong to him; for, as Longinus says, wherever he affected to be pleasant, he made himself ridiculous; and if he happened to raise a laugh, it was chiefly upon himself. Whereas Cicero, from a perpetual fund of wit and ridicule, had the power always to please, when he found himself unable to convince, and could put his judges into good humour, when he had cause to be afraid of their severity; so that, by the opportunity of a well-timed joke, he is said to have preserved many of his clients from manifest

ruin.

Yet in all this height and fame of his eloquence, there was another set of orators at the same time in Rome, men of parts and learning, and of the first quality; who while they acknowledged the superiority of his genius, yet censured his diction, as not truly attic or classical; some calling it loose and languid, others tumid and exuberant. These men affected a minute and

fastidious correctness, pointed sentences, short and concise periods, without a syllable to spare in them, as if the perfection of oratory consisted in a frugality of words, and in crowding our sentiments into the narrowest compass. The chief patrons of this taste were M. Brutus, Licinius, Calvus, Asinius, Pollio, and Sallust, whom Seneca seems to treat as the author of the obscure, abrupt, and sententious style. Cicero often ridicules these pretenders to attic elegance as judging of eloquence not by the force of the art, but their own weakness; and resolving to decry what they could not attain, and to admire nothing but what they could imitate; and though their way of speaking, he says, might please the ear of a critic or a scholar, yet it was not of that sublime and sonorous kind, whose end was not only to instruct, but to move an audience; an eloquence, born for the multitude; whose merit was always shewn by its effects of exciting admiration, and extorting shouts of applause; and on which there never was any difference of judgment between the learned and the populace.

This was the genuine eloquence that prevailed in Rome as long as Cicero lived; his were the only speeches that were relished or admired by the city; while those attic orators, as they called themselves, were generally despised, and frequently deserted by the audience, in the midst of their harangues. But after Cicero's death, and the ruin of the republic, the Roman oratory sunk of course with its liberty, and a false species universally prevailed; when instead of that elate, copious, and flowing eloquence, which launched out freely into every subject, there succeeded a guarded, dry, sententious kind, full of laboured turns and studied points; and proper only for the occasion on which it was employed, the making panegyrics and servile compliments to their tyrants. This change of style may be observed in all their writers, from Cicero's time to the younger Pliny; who carried it to its utmost perfection, in his celebrated panegyric on the emperor Trajan; which, as it is justly admired for the elegance of diction, the beauty of sentiments, and the delicacy of its compliments, so it is become in a manner the standard of fine speaking to modern times, where it is common to hear the pretenders to criticism, descanting on the tedious length and spiritless exuberance of the Ciceronian periods. But the superi

ority of Cicero's eloquence, as it was acknowledged by the politest age of free Rome, so it has received the most authentic confirmation that the nature of things can admit, from the concurrent sense of nations; which, neglecting the productions of his rivals and contemporaries, have preserved to us his inestimable remains, as a specimen of the most perfect manner of speaking, to which the language of mortals can be exalted: so that, as Quinctilian declared of him even in that early age, he has acquired such fame with posterity, that Cicero is not reckoned so much the name of a man, as of eloquence

itself.

$49. The Character of MARTIN LUTHIER. While appearances of danger daily increased, and the tempest, which had been so long a-gathering, was ready to break forth in all its violence against the protestant church, Luther was saved, by a seasonable death, from feeling or beholding its destructive rage. Having gone, though in a declining state of health, and during a rigorous season, to his native city of Eisleben, in order to compose, by his authority, a dissension among the counts of Mansfield, he was seized with a violent inflammation in his stomach, which in a few days put an end to his life, in the sixtythird year of his age.---As he was raised up by providence to be the author of one of the greatest and most interesting revolutions recorded in history, there is not any person, perhaps, whose character has been drawn with such opposite colours. In his own age, one party, struck with horror, and inflamed with rage, when they saw with what a daring hand he overturned every thing which they held to be sacred, or valued as beneficial, imputed to him not only all the defects and vices of a man, but the qualities of a dæmon. The other, warmed with admiration and gratitude, which they thought he merited, as the restorer of light and liberty to the Christian church, ascribed to him perfections above the condition of humanity, and viewed all his actions with a veneration bordering on that which should be paid only to those who are guided by the immediate inspiration of Heaven. It is his own conduct, not the undistinguishing censure, nor the exaggerated praise of his contemporaries, which ought to regulate the opinions of the present age concerning him. Zeal for what he regarded as truth, un

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daunted intrepidity to maintain it, abilities both natural and acquired to defend it, and unwearied industry to propagate it, are virtues which shine so conspicuously in every part of his behaviour, that even his enemies must allow him to have possessed them in an eminent degree. these may be added, with equal justice, such purity, and even austerity of manners, as became one who assumed the character of a reformer; such sanctity of life as suited the doctrine which he delivered; and such perfect disinterestedness as affords no slight presumption of his sincerity. Superior to all selfish considerations, a stranger to the elegancies of life, and despising its pleasures, he left the honours and emoluments

of the church to his disciples; remaining satisfied himself in his original state of professor in the university, and pastor to the town of Wittemberg, with the moderate appointments annexed to these offices. His extraordinary qualities were alloyed with no inconsiderable mixture of human frailty, and human passions. These, however, were of such a nature, that they cannot be imputed to malevolence or corruption of heart, but seem to have taken their rise from the same source with many of his virtues. His mind, forcible and vehement in all its operations, roused by great objects, or agitated by violent passions, broke out, on many occasions, with an impetuosity which astonishes men of feebler spirits, or such as are placed in a more tranquil situation. By carrying some praiseworthy dispositions to excess, he bordered sometimes on what was culpable, and was often betrayed into actions which exposed him to censure. His confidence that his own opinions were well founded, approached to arrogance; his courage in asserting them, to rashness; his firmness in adhering to them, to obstinacy; and his zeal in confuting his adversaries, to rage and scurrility. Accustomed himself to consider every thing as subordinate to truth, he expected the same deference for it from other men; and, without making any allowances for their timidity or prejudices, he poured forth, against those who disappointed him in this particular, a torrent of invective mingled with contempt. Regardless of any distinction of rank or character, when his doctrines were attacked, he chastised all his adversaries, indiscriminately, with the same rough hand; neither the royal dignity of Henry VIII. nor the eminent learning and ability of Erasmus,

screened them from the same abuse with which he treated Tetzel or Eccius.

But these indecencies of which Luther was guilty, must not be imputed wholly to the violence of his temper. They ought to be charged in part on the manners of the age. Among a rude people, unac quainted with those maxims, which, by putting continual restraint on the passions of individuals, have polished society, and rendered it agreeable, disputes of every kind were managed with heat, and strong emotions were uttered in their natural language, without reserve or delicacy. At the same time, the works of learned men were all composed in Latin; and they were not only authorized, by the example of eminent writers in that language, to use their antagonists with the most illiberal scurrility; but, in a dead tongue, indecencies of every kind appear less shocking than in a living language, whose idioms and phrases seem gross, because they are familiar.

In passing judgment upon the characters of men, we ought to try them by the principles and maxims of their own age, not by those of another. For although virtue and vice are at all times the same, manners and customs vary continually. Some parts of Luther's behaviour, which to us appear most culpable, gave no disgust to his contemporaries. It was even by some of those qualities which we are now apt to blame, that he was fitted for accomplishing the great work which he undertook. Torouse mankind, when sunk in ignorance or superstition, and to encounter the rage of bigotry, armed with power, required the utmost vehemence of zeal, and a temper daring to excess. A gentle call would neither have reached, nor have excited those to whom it was addressed. A spirit more amiable, but less vigorous than Luther's, would have shrunk back from the dangers which he braved and surmounted. Towards the close of Luther's life, though without a perceptible declension of his zeal or abilities, the infirmities of his temper increased upon him, so that he daily grew more peevish, more irascible, and more impatient of contradiction. Having lived to be witness of his own amazing success; to see a great part of Europe embrace his doctrines; and to shake the foundation of the Papal throne, before which the mightiest monarchs had trembled, he discovered, on some occasions, symptoms of vanity and

self-applause.

He must have been indeed more than man, if, upon contemplating all that he actually accomplished, he had never felt any sentiment of this kind rising in his breast.

Some time before his death he felt his strength declining, his constitution being worn out by a prodigious multiplicity of business, added to the labour of discharging his ministerial function with unremitting diligence, to the fatigue of constant study, besides the composition of works as voluminous as if he had enjoyed uninterrupted leisure and retirement. His natural intrepidity did not forsake him at the approach of death: his last conversation with his friends was concerning the happiness reserved for good men in a future world, of which he spoke with the fervour and delight natural to one who expected and wished to enter soon upon the enjoyment of it. The account of his death filled the Roman Catholic party with excessive as well as indecent joy, and damped the spirits of all his followers; neither party sufficiently considering that his doctrines were now so firmly rooted, as to be in a condition to flourish, independent of the hand which first had planted them. His funeral was celebrated, by order of the Elector of Saxony, with extraordinary pomp. He left several children by his wife, Catharine Bore, who survived him: towards the end of the last century, there were in Saxony some of his descendants in decent and honourable stations.

§ 50.

Robertson. Character of ALFRED King of England.

The merit of this prince, both in private and public life, may with advantage be set in opposition to that of any monarch or citizen which the annals of any age or any nation can present to us. He seems indeed to be the complete model of that perfect character, which, under the denomination of a sage or wise man, the philosophers have been fond of delineating, rather as a fiction of their imagination, than in hopes of ever seeing it reduced to practice: so happily were all his virtues tempered together, so justly were they blended, and so powerfully did each prevent the other from exceeding its proper bounds. He knew how to conciliate the most enterprising spirit with the coolest moderation; the most obsti

nate perseverance with the easiest flexibility; the most severe justice with the greatest lenity; the greatest rigour in command with the greatest affability of deportment; the highest capacity and inclination for science, with the most shining talents for action. His civil and his military virtues are almost equally the objects of our admiration, excepting only, that the former being more rare among princes, as well as more useful, seem chiefly to challenge our applause. Nature also, as if desirous that so bright a production of her skill should be set in the fairest light, had bestowed on him all bodily accomplishments, vigour of limbs, dignity of shape and air, and a pleasant, engaging, and open countenance. For tune alone, by throwing him into that barbarous age, deprived him of historians worthy to transmit his fame to posterity; and we wish to see him delineated in more lively colours, and with more particular strokes, that we may at least perceive some of those small specks and blemishes, from which, as a man, it is impossible he could be entirely exempted.

Hume.

$51. Another Character of ALFRed. Alfred, that he might be the better able to extend his charity and munificence, re gulated his finances with the most perfect economy, and divided his revenues into a certain number of parts, which he appropriated to the different expences of the state, and the exercise of his own private liberality and devotion; nor was he a less economist in the distribution of his time, which he divided into three equal portions, allotting one to sleep, meals, and exercise; and devoting the other two to writing, reading, business, and prayer. That this division might not be encroached upon inadvertently, he measured them by tapers of an equal size, which he kept continually burning before the shrines of relics. Alfred seemed to be a genius self-taught, which contrived and comprehended every thing that could contribute to the security of his kingdom. He was author of that inestimable privilege peculiar to the subjects of this nation, which consists in their being tried by their peers; for he first instituted juries, or at least improved upon an old institution, by specifying the number and qualifications of jurymen, and extending their power to trials of

property as well as criminal indictments; but no regulation redounded more to his honour and the advantage of his kingdom, than the measures he took to prevent rapine, murder, and other outrages, which had so long been committed with impunity. His attention stooped even to the meanest circumstances of his people's conveniency. He introduced the art of brick-making, and built his own houses of those materials, which being inuch more durable and secure from accidents than timber, his example was followed by his subjects in general. He was, doubtless, an object of most perfect esteem and admiration; for, exclusive of the qualities which distinguished him as a warrior and legislator, his personal character was amiable in every respect. Died 897, aged 52. Smollett.

§ 52. Character of WILLIAM the Conqueror.

Few princes have been more fortunate than this great monarch, or were better entitled to prosperity and grandeur, for the abilities and vigour of mind which he displayed in all his conduct. His spirit was bold and enterprising, yet guided by prudence. His ambition, which was exorbitant, and lay little under the restraints of justice, and still less under those of humanity, ever submitted to the dictates of reason and sound policy. Born in an age when the minds of men were intractable and unacquainted with submission, he was yet able to direct them to his purposes; and, partly from the ascendant of his vehement disposition, partly from art and dissimulation, to establish an unlimited monarchy. Though not insensible to generosity, he was hardened against compassion, and seemed equally ostentatious and ambitious of eclat in his clemency and his severity. The maxims of his administration were severe; but might have been useful, had they been solely employed in preserving order in an established government; they were ill calculated for softening the rigours, which under the most gentle management are inseparable from conquest. His attempt against England was the last enterprise of this kind, which, during the course of seven hundred years, has fully succeeded in Europe; and the greatness of his genius broke through those limits, which first the feudal institutions, then the refined policy of princes, have fixed

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