flood of waters, and frost, like a flood of class, an awkward and unmannered blunfire, upon his host; and Napoleon, like derer; and to a fourth, the very demon Satan, yielded to God alone, and might of curiosity, a machine of questions, an have exclaimed, with that lost arch-embodied inquisition. One acute spectator, angel "Into what pit thou seest, He with his thunder, and, till then, who knew the husband of Madame Rahel, reports a perpetual scowl on his brow, and a perpetual smile on his lips. We care very little for such representations, which rather describe the man's moods than the man himself. We heard once, we protest, Thus had man and his Maker come into a more edifying picture of him from the collision, and the potsherd was broken lips of a Scottish innkeeper, who declared in the unequal strife. All that followed that he believed "Boney, when he was resembled only the convulsive struggles at leasure, aye sat, wi' his airm in a bowl of one down, taken, and bound. Even o' water, resting on a cannon-ball, an' nae when cast back, like a burning ember, from doubt meditauting mischief!" It were Elba to the French shores, it was evi- difficult to catch the features of an undently all too late. His "star" had first developed thought-and what else was paled before the fires of Moscow, and Napoleon? at last set amid the snows of his flight! from it. As concentration was the power of his mind, so it was the peculiarity of his person. His body was a little vial of intense existence. The thrones of Europe seemed falling before a ninepin! He seemed made of skin, marrow, bone, and fire. Had France been in labour, and brought forth a mouse? But it was a frame formed for endurance. It took no punishment, it felt no fatigue, it refreshed itself by a wink, its tiny hand shivered kingdoms at a touch, and its voice, small as the "treble of a fay," was powerful and irresistible as the roar of Mars, the homicidal god. Nature is often strange in her economies of power. She often packs her poisons and her glorious essences alike into small bulk. In Napoleon, as in Alexander the Great and Alexander Pope, a portion of both was strangely and inextricably mingled. Of the private character of Napoleon there are many contradictory opinions. Indeed, properly speaking, he had no private character at all. For the greater part of his life, he was as public as the sun. He ate and drank, read and wrote, snuffed and slept in a glare of publicity. The wrinkles, darkening into gloom, on that massive forehead, did indeed conceal many a dark and secret thought; but his mere actions and habitudes were all public property. How tell what he was in private, since in private he never was? He was like the man who had "lost his shadow." No sweet relief, no dim and tender background in his character. Whatever private virtues he might have possessed, never found an atmosphere to develop them in; nay, they withered and We might deduce many lessons from died in the surrounding sunshine. He this rapid sketch of the Emperor of the had no time to be a good son, or husband, French. That "moral of his story," of or father, or friend. The idea which de- which Symmons speaks, would require voured him devoured all such ties too. seven thunders fully to express it. We Still, we hope that he never ceased to will not dwell on the commonplaces about possess a heart, and that much of his "vaulting ambition," "diseased pride," apathy and apparent hardness of nature "fallen greatness," "lesson to be humble was the effect of policy, or of absence of and thankful in our own spheres," and mind. A thousand different spectators so on. Napoleon was a brave, great man; report differently of his manner in private. in part mistaken, perhaps also in part To some, he appeared all grace and dig- insane, and also in a large part guilty. nity; to others, a cold, absent fiend, lost But he did a work-not his full work, but in schemes of far-off villany; to a third still a work that he only could have ac VOL. I.-T complished. He continued that shaking the ancient polypharmist and mistaken of the sediments of the nations, which alchymist was the parent and the prophecy the French Revolution began. He point- of those modern chemists, so, in this age, ed attention with his bristling guns to Napoleon has been the unwitting pioneer the danger the civilisation of Europe is and imperfect prophet of a Sovereign, the exposed to from the Russian silent con- extent and the duration of whose kingdom spiracy of ages-cold, vast, quietly pro- shall equal and surpass his wildest dreams. gressive, as a glacier gathering round Did he, by sheer native genius, nearly an Alpine valley. He shook the throne snatch from the hands of all kings their of the Austrian domination, and left that time-honoured sceptres-nearly confirm his of his own successors tottering to receive sway into a concentrated and iron empire them. He drew out, by long antagonism, the resources of Britain. He cast a ghastly smile of contempt, which lingers still, around the papal crown. While he proved the disadvantages, as well as advantages, of the domination of a single human mind, he unconsciously shadowed forth the time when one divine hand shall take the kingdom-his empire, during its palmy days, forming a feeble, earthly emblem of the reign of the Universal King. A new Napoleon, were he rising, would not long continue to reign. But even as and prove the advantages of centralisation, as they were never proved before? And why should not "another king, one Jesus," exerting a mightier might, obtain a more lasting empire, and form the only real government which, save the short theocracy of the Jews, ever existed on earth? We pause-nay, nature, the world, the church, poor afflicted humanity, distracted governments, falling thrones, earth and heaven together, seem to pause with us, to hear the wherefore to this why. Part Third. Novelists. WILLIAM GODWIN. ency" in the mode by which he built up his system of the universe. Seizing on the paradoxes of preceding philosophers, stones rejected by other builders, he put them together, interfused them with a certain cement of his own, and reared with them a towering and formidable His " Theory of Political "WHO's Godwin?" said once a respect- |ness of a very rare order of minds. He able person to us, while panegyrising in had not the one huge glaring orb of a our own way the venerable sage. As we Cyclops, letting in a flood of rushing and hear the question echoed by some of our furious splendour, and rendering its posreaders, we propose to tell them a little sessor miserable in his might: his mental about him, and do not despair of get-glance was mild, full, penetrating, and ting them to love him, ere we be done. comprehensive. He was not gifted with William Godwin was a philosopher, and the power of adding any new truth to the a philosophical novelist, an essayist, a precious catalogue. He was the eloquent biographer, at one period a preacher,* interpreter and fearless follower out of and the author of a volume of sermons, the subtle speculations of such men as the writer of one or two defunct tragedies, Berkeley, Hobbes, Hume, Coleridge, and a historian, the founder of a small but Ricardo. There was a "daring consistdistinguished school of writers, in England and America; and, in spite of his errors, an exceedingly candid, generous, simple-minded, and honest man. His intellect was clear, searching, sagacious, and profound. He thought every subject out and out for himself, using, however, the while, the aids derived from an en- structure. larged intimacy with still deeper and Justice" was a Tower of Babel, composed subtler understandings. His was not of the most contradictory materials, "in that one-sided intensity of original view ruin reconciled:" partly of the sophistries which is at once the power and the weak- of Hume, partly of the subtleties of Jona* Godwin, we have been told since writ- than Edwards; here a stone from the ing this sketch, had succeeded his father, quarries of Spinoza, and there a bale of who was strictly orthodox, in his pulpit: he goods from the warehouse of Adam Smith. read sometimes his own sermons, and some- The grand principle pervading his works times his father's, to his congregation. The latter, which were known by their evangelical was, that love to being in general ought, sentiment and their dingy colour, were much if not to annihilate, to overshadow priadmired; the former not at all. So soon as vate relations and individual charities. the stock of paternal discourses was fairly Snatching this paradox, or, at best, parexhausted, the future author of "Caleb Wil- tial truth, from the holy hand of the liams" resigned his charge, and betook him- author of the "Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will," he carried it around as a touchstone to every self to London and literature. This we state on the authority of his present successor in the same pastoral charge. institution of society. We can easily con- its more obnoxious parts were either exceive what wild work he would thus make. pressly or silently renounced by the writer He became, indeed, in the language of himself. Burke, one of the "ablest architects of It were vain at this time of day to ruin," as if he had learned it from the analyse or argue against a forgotten "old earthquake demon," described by dream. Enough to acknowledge, which his celebrated son-in-law. On titles and we do now with all safety, that it was a on property, on monarchy and on mar- work of much power and eloquence; that riage, on commerce and on gratitude, he it was written in a clear, terse, fluent, trode with disdain. Necessity, he pro- and even brilliant style; that, though claimed, in one of the most fascinating the root of the thinking lay generally in and eloquent chapters of philosophical other writers, yet the bold turn and shoot criticism we have ever read, to be the of the branches, and the fell lustre of the Mother of the World. And yet every- fruit, were all his own; and that it must thing must be changed! Thrones were always be interesting as one of the most bubbles; titles, nicknames; crowns, mo- deliberate, laboured, and daring attempts mentary circles in the stream of ages; ever made by man, to found a system of the marriage-ring, degrading as the link society utterly distinct and insulated from of the prisoner, or the round fetter of the every other that has existed before. It slave. Old things were to pass away: may be called an effort by a single hand all things to be made new. Even the to "roll back the eternal wheels of the "law and the testimony" were to be universe." And now, to recur to a former veiled, if not obliterated. A new era figure, it seems to the imagination, through must burst upon the world. Man must the vista of half-a-century, to rise up a erect himself from his thousand slaveries great, grotesque structure, which, unsanc-freetioned by Deity, unfinished by its architect, deserted by its friends, mutilated by its foes, stands an everlasting monument of the mingled wisdom and folly, the strength and the weakness of man. "Equal, sceptreless; Unclass'd, tribeless, and nationless; Which were, for his will made and suffer'd Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like From chance, and death, and mutability: Never did book rise or sink more rapidly. Now it flared a meteor, "with fear of change perplexing monarchs," as well as lightening into many a still chamber, and many an enthusiast heart; and now it sunk a cold and heavy dreg upon the ground. While "Caleb Williams" is in every circulating library, and needed at one time more frequently, we have It was a brilliant, but dangerous vision; heard, than almost any novel, to be reone of those sun-tinted phantasms which placed, the "Inquiry into Political Jusrose from the gulf of the French Revolu- tice" is read only by a few hardy extion, ere it had yet become an abyss of plorers, and reminds them, contrasting blood. We have recounted it thus calmly, its past influence with its present neglect, because its author was a harmless and of some cataract, once the terror and the sincere enthusiast; because, gossamer glory of the wilderness, but which, by though its web was, it caught for a sea- the fall of its cliff of vantage, has been son such dragon-flies as Coleridge and robbed of its voice of thunder, shorn of Wordsworth (who said to a student, its Samson-like locks of spray, dwarfed "Burn your books of chemistry, and read into comparative insipidity, deserted by 'Godwin on Necessity'"); because, thirdly, its crowding admirers, and left to pine it has long ago vanished from the public alone in the desert of which it was once attention, and, indeed, before his death, the pride, and to sigh for the days of other years. And yet, while of "Caleb He has more passion than imagination. Williams" it was predicted by some sa- Even his passion he has learned more by pient friend that, if published, it would sympathy than by personal feeling. And be the grave of his literary reputation, amid his most tempestuous scenes, you the other lifted him, as on dragon wings, see the calm and stern eye of philosophic into instant and dangerous popularity; analysis looking on. His imagery is not the "Inquiry" was the balloon which bore copious, nor always original, but its sparsehim giddily up-the novel the parachute ness is its strength; it startles you with which broke his fall. unexpected and momentary brilliance; As a novelist, indeed, Godwin, apart the flash comes sudden as the lightning; from the accidents of opinion and popular like it, too, it comes from the clouds, and, caprice, occupies a higher place than as like it, it bares the breast of heaven in a philosopher. As a philosopher, he is an instant, and in an instant is gone. neither altogether new nor altogether No preparatory flourish or preliminary true; he is ingenious, but unsafe, and the sound-no sheets of useless splendour;width of the field he traverses, and the each figure is a fork of fire which strikes, celerity with which he runs across it, and and needs no second blow. Nay, often the calm dogmatism with which he an- his images are singularly commonplace, nounces the most extreme and startling and you wonder how they move you so, till opinions, excite suspicions as to the depth you resolve this into the power of the of his knowledge, and the comprehension hand which flings its own energy in them. of his views. They surround the figure His style is not the least remarkable of the sage with an air and edging of thing about his compositions. It is a charlatanry. As a novelist, on the con- smooth succession of short and simple trary, he passes for no more than he is sentences, each clear as crystal, and none a real and robust original. He proceeds ever distracting the attention from the in this walk with the exulting freedom subject to its own construction. It is a and confidence of one who has hit on a style in which you cannot explain how vein entirely new. He imagines a cha- the total effect rises out of the individual racter after his own heart; a quiet, curious, parts, and which is forgotten as entirely prying, philosophical being, with a strong during perusal as is the pane of glass underdash of the morbid, if not of the through which you gaze at a comet or a mad; and he thickens around him cir- star. The form, too, favours the general cumstances which, by making him alto- effect. Each narrative takes the shape gether a misanthrope, and nearly a ma- of an autobiography, and the incessant niac, bring out all the powers and the recurrence of the pronoun I transports you passions of his nature. The main actor to a confessional, where you hear told you, in each of his tales, at first recumbent, in subdued tones, a tale which might is, at length, ere you leave him, rampant rouse the dead to hear." Systematiwith whatever may be the pervading cally he rejects the use of supernatural principle of his being. And so with the machinery, profuse descriptions, and mere author himself; he, too, catches fire by mechanical horrors. Like Brockden Brown, running. At first slow, embarrassed, un- he despises to summon up a ghost from the interesting, commonplace, he becomes ra- grave; he invokes the "mightier might" pid, ardent, overpowering. The general of the passions of living flesh; he excites tone of his writing, however, is calm. terror often, but it is the terror which "In the very whirlwind of his passion, dilated man wields over his fellow-coloshe begets a temperance which gives it sal and crushing, but distinct; not the smoothness." His heat is never that of vague and shadowy form of fear which the sun with all his beams around him; springs from preternatural agency. His but of the round rayless orb seen shining path is not, like that of Monk Lewis and from the summit of Mont Blanc, still Maturin, sulphureous and slippery, as and stripped in the deep black ether. through some swart mine; it is a terribil |