is not a reasoning animal, he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal." Burke is fond of telling us that he is no lawyer, no antiquarian, but a plain, practical man; and the Cardinal, in like manner, is ever insisting that he is no theologian-he leaves everything of that sort to the Schools, whatever they may be, and simply deals with religion on its practical side as a benefit to mankind. If either of these great men has been guilty of intellectual excesses, those of Burke may be attributed to his dread of anarchy, those of Newman to his dread of atheism. Neither of them was prepared to rest content with a scientific frontier, an imaginary line. So much did they dread their enemy, so alive were they to the terrible strength of some of his positions, that they could not agree to dispense with the protection afforded by the huge mountains of prejudice and the ancient rivers of custom. The sincerity of either man can only be doubted by the bigot and the fool. But Burke, apart from his fears, had a constitutional love for old things, simply because they were old. Anything mankind had ever worshipped, or venerated, or obeyed, was dear to him. I have already referred to his providing his Brahmins with a greenhouse for the purpose of their rites, which he watched from outside with great interest. One cannot fancy Cardinal Newman peeping through a window to see men worshipping false though ancient gods. Warren Hastings's highhanded dealings with the temples and timehonoured if scandalous customs of the Hindoos filled Burke with horror. So, too, he respected Quakers, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and all those whom he called Constitutional Dissenters. He has a fine passage somewhere about Rust, for with all his passion for good government he dearly loved a little rust. In this phase of character he reminds one not a little of another great writer-whose death literature has still reason to deplore-George Eliot; who, in her love for old hedge-rows and barns and crumbling moss-grown walls, was a writer after Burke's own heart, whose novels he would have sat up all night to devour; for did he not deny with warmth Gibbon's statement that he had read all five volumes of Evelina in a day? "The thing is impossible," cried Burke; "they took me three days doing nothing else." Now, Evelina is a good novel, but Silas Marner is a better. Wordsworth has been called the High Priest of Nature. Burke may be called the High Priest of Order a lover of settled ways, of justice, peace, and security. His writings are a storehouse of wisdom, not the cheap shrewdness of the mere man of the world, but the noble, animating wisdom of one who has the poet's heart as well as the statesman's brain. Nobody is fit to govern this country who has not drunk deep at the springs of Burke. "Have you read your Burke?" is at least as sensible a question to put to a parliamentary candidate, as to ask him whether he is a total abstainer or a desperate drunkard. Something there may be about Burke to regret, and more to dispute; but that he loved justice and hated iniquity is certain, as also it is that for the most part he dwelt in the paths of purity, humanity, and good sense. May we be found adhering to them! N STERNE O less pious a railway director than Sir Edward Watkin once prefaced an oration to the shareholders of one of his numerous undertakings by expressing, in broken accents, the wish that "He who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb might deal gently with illustrious personages in their present grievous affliction." The wish was a kind one, and is only referred to here as an illustration of the amazing skill of the author of the phrase quoted in so catching the tone, temper, and style of King James's version, that the words occur to the feeling mind as naturally as any in Holy Writ as the best expression of a sorrowful emotion. The phrase itself is, indeed, an excellent example of Sterne's genius for pathos. No one knew better than he how to drive words home. George Herbert, in his selection of Outlandish Proverbs, to which he subsequently gave the alternate title Jacula Prudentum, has the following: "To a close-shorn sheep God gives wind by measure"; but this proverb in that wording would never have succeeded in making the chairman of a railway company believe he had read it somewhere in the Bible. It is the same thought, but the words which convey it stop far short of the heart. A close-shorn sheep will not brook comparison with Sterne's "shorn lamb "; whilst the tender, compassionate, beneficent "God tempers the wind " makes the original "God gives wind by measure" wear the harsh aspect of a wholly unnecessary infliction. Sterne is our best example of the plagiarist whom none dare make ashamed. He robbed other men's orchards with both hands; and yet no more original writer than he ever went to press in these isles. He has been dogged, of course; but, as was befitting in his case, it has been done pleasantly. Sterne's detective was the excellent Dr. Ferriar, of Manchester, whose Illustrations of Sterne, first published in 1798, were written at an earlier date for the edification of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Those were pleasant days, when men of reading were content to give their best thoughts first to their friends and then-ten years afterwards-to the public. Dr. Ferriar's book is worthy of its subject. The motto on the title-page is delightfully chosen. It is taken from the opening paragraph of Lord Shaftesbury's Miscellaneous Reflections: "Peace be with the soul of that charitable and courteous Author who for the common benefit of his fellowAuthors introduced the ingenious way of MISCELLANEOUS WRITING." Here Dr. Ferriar stopped; but I will add the next sentence: It must be owned that since this happy method was established the Harvest of Wit has been more plentiful and the Labourers more in number than heretofore." Wisely, indeed, did Charles Lamb declare Shaftesbury was not too genteel for him. No pleasanter penance for random thinking can be devised than spending an afternoon turning over Shaftesbury's three volumes and trying to discover how near he ever did come to saying that "Ridicule was the test of truth." Dr. Ferriar's happy motto puts the reader in a sweet temper to start with, for he sees at once that the author is no pedantic, soured churl, but a good fellow who is going to make a little sport with a celebrated wit, and show you how a genius fills his larder. The first thing that strikes you in reading Dr. Ferriar's book is the marvellous skill with which Sterne has created his own atmosphere and characters, in spite of the fact that some of the most characteristic remarks of his characters are, in the language of the Old Bailey, "stolen goods." "There is no cause but one,' replied my Uncle Toby,' why one man's nose is longer than another's, but because God pleases to have it so.' 'That is Grangousier's solution,' said my father. ""Tis he,' continued my Uncle Toby, looking up and not regarding my father's interruption, who makes us all, and frames and puts us together in such forms and proportions and for such ends as is agreeable to His infinite wisdom.'" "Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh'; and if those are not the words of my Uncle Toby, it is idle to believe in anything": and yet we read in Rabelais-as, indeed, Sterne suggests to us we should-" Pour-quoi,' dit Gargantua, est-ce que frère Jean a si beau nez?' Parce,' répondit Grangousier, 'qu'ainsi Dieu l'a voulu, lequel nous fait en telle forme et à telle fin selon son divin arbitre, que fait un potier ses vaisseaux."" |