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THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

The Examiner.] [November 18, 1821. THE diffusion of knowledge, of inquiry, of doubt (or what Lord Bacon calls the infinite agitation of wit') puts an end to the soul of goodness' that there is in bigotry and superstition, and should to its evil spirit at the same time. There is nothing so intolerable as the union (which we see so common in modern times) of religious hypocrisy with literary scepticism. The real bigot is a respectable as well as enviable character. Not so the affected one. Downright, rooted, rancorous prejudices are honest, hearty, wholesome things. They keep the mind in breath. Not so the whining, hollow, designing cant, which echoes without feeling them. The barbarous cruelties of savage tribes are partly atoned for by the keen appetite for revenge in which they originate: but we do not extend the same excuse to those who poison for hire. The fires of Smithfield were kindled by a zeal that burnt as bright and fierce as they. Our contemporaries who are in the habit of throwing firebrands and death, do it without malice; and laugh at those who do not understand the jest. The multiplication of sects dissipates and tames down the rage of martyrdom. The first grand defection indeed from an established and universal faith, creates a shock and is assailed with a violence proportioned to the firmness with which the parent-belief has been rooted in the public mind but the subsequent ramification of different schisms and modes of faith from the first enormous heresy, tires out and neutralises the spirit of both persecution and fanaticism. Religious controversy is a war of words, and no longer a war of extermination. There may be the same heart-burnings, the same jealousies of difference of opinion; but they do not lead to the same fatal catastrophes or the same heroic sacrifices. We cannot burn or hang one another for differing from the Catholic faith as a crime of the most dreadful import, when hardly any two men can be found to agree in the interpretation of the same text. All opinions, by constant collision and attrition, become, if not equally probable, equally familiar. Men's minds are slowly weaned from blind idolatrous bigotry and intolerant zeal, by the continually increasing number of points of controversy and the frequency of dispute. Then comes the general question as to the grounds and reasonableness of the doctrines of religion itself; and a sceptical, dispassionate, Epicurean work, like Bayle's Dictionary or Hume's Essays, gives the finishing blow to what little remains of dogmatical faith in established systems. After that, a zealot is another name for an imposter. The reasons for belief may be as good or stronger than ever; but the belief itself, as it is more rational, is less gross and

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headstrong. The closest deductions of the understanding do not act like an instinct, or warrant a mortal antipathy; and let the philosophical believer's convictions be what they will, he cannot affect an ignorance that it is possible for others to differ with him. A violent and overstrained affectation of Orthodoxy is, after a certain time, a sure sign of insincerity: the only zeal that can claim to be according to knowledge,' is refined, calm, and considerate. I do not speak of this sort of mitigated, sceptical, liberalised, enlightened belief, as 'a consummation devoutly to be wished:' (in my own particular, I would rather have held opinion with Guy Faux, and have gone or sent others to the Devil for that opinion)-I speak of the common course of human affairs. I remember once observing to Wilkie, the celebrated artist, that Dr. Chalmers (his old friend and schoolfellow) had started an objection to the Christian religion, in order to have the credit of answering it. The Scottish Teniers said, that if the answer was a good one, he thought him right in bringing forward the objection. I did not think this remark savoured of the acuteness one would expect from such a man as Wilkie, and only said, I apprehended those opinions were the strongest which had been never called in question. Reasoning is not believing-whatever seeing may be, according to the proverb.

A devoted and incorrigible attachment to individuals, as well as to doctrines, is weakened by the progress of knowledge and civilization. A spirit of scepticism, of inquiry, of comparison, is introduced there too, by the course of reading, observation, and reflection, which strikes at the root of our disproportionate idolatry. Margaret Lambrun did not think there was such another woman in the world as her mistress, Queen Mary; nor could she, after her death, see any thing in it worth living for. Had she had access to a modern circulating library, she would have read of a hundred such heroines, all peerless alike; and would have consoled herself for the death of them all, one after another, pretty much in the same manner. Margaret was not one of those who argue, according to Mr. Burke's improved political catechism, that a king is but a king; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and that not an animal of the highest order.' She had more respect of persons than this. The truth is, she had never seen such another woman as her mistress, and she had no means, by books or otherwise, of forming an idea of any thing but what she saw. In that isolated state of society, people grew together like trees, and clung round the strongest for support, as the vine curls its tendrils.' They became devoted to others with the same violence of attachment as they were to themselves. Novels, plays, magazines, treatises of philosophy, Monthly Museums, and

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Belles Assemblées, did not fly in numbers about the country and 'through the airy region stream so bright,' as to blot out the impression of all real forms. The effects of habit, of sense, of service, of affection, did not find an ideal level in general literature and artificial models. The heart made its election once, and was fixed till death the eyes doated on fancied perfection, and were divorced from every other object afterwards. There was not the same communication of ideas; there was not the same change of place or acquaintance. The prejudices of rank, of custom, strengthened the bias of individual admiration; and it is no wonder, where all these circumstances were combined, that the presence of a person, whom we had loved and served, became a feeling, an appetite, and a passion in the mind, almost necessary to existence. The taking our idol away (and by cruel and treacherous means) would be taking away the prop that sustained life, and on which all the pride of the affections leant. Its loss would be the loss of another self; and a double loss of this kind (as in the instance alluded to) could seek for no solace but in the death of her who had caused it. Where the mind had become rivetted to a certain object, where it had embarked its all in the sacred cause of friendship and inviolable fidelity, it would be in vain to offer the consolations of philosophy when the heart owned none. Other scenes, new friends, fresh engagements, might be proper for others; but Margaret Lambrun's wounded spirit could find no relief but in looking forward to a full revenge for a murdered mistress and husband. You might as well think of wedding the soul to another body, as of inspiring her with other hopes and thoughts than those which she had lost for ever:-she could not live without those whom she had loved so well and long, and she was ready to die for them. Life becomes indifferent to a mind haunted by a passion of this sort. Death is not then a choice, but rather a necessity. We cannot live, and have the desire nearest to our souls. To play the hero, it is only necessary to be wound up to such an unavoidable interest in any thing, as reflection, prudence, natural instinct, have no power over. To be a hero, is, in other words, to lose the sense of our personal identity in some object dearer to us than ourselves. He may purchase any thing he pleases, who is ready to part with his life for it. Wherever there is a passion or belief strong enough to blind us to consequences, there the mind is capable of any sacrifice and of any undertaking.

The heroical is the fanaticism of common life: it is the contempt of danger, of pain, of death, in the pursuit of a favourite idea. The rule of honour, as of conscience, is to contemplate things in the abstract, and never as affecting or re-acting upon yourself; the hero

is an instrument in the hands of fate, as is himself impassive to its blows. A man in a passion, or who is worked up to a certain pitch of enthusiasm, minds nothing else. The fear of death, the love of self, is but an idea or motive with a certain habitual strength. Raise any other idea or feeling to a greater habitual or momentary height, and it will supplant or overrule the first. Courage is sometimes the effect of despair. Women, in a fit of romance, or on some sudden emergency, have been known to perform feats of heroic daring, from which men of the stoutest nerves might shrink with dismay. Maternal tenderness is heroic. Affection of any kind, that doats upon a particular object, and absorbs every other consideration in that, is in its nature heroic.1 Passion is the great ingredient in heroism. He who stops to reflect, to balance one thing against another, is a coward. The better part of valour is indiscretion. All passion is a short-lived madness, or state of intoxication, in which some present impulse or prevailing idea gets uncontrouled possession of the mind, and lords it there at will. A man may be (almost literally) drunk with choler, with love, with jealousy, with revenge, as he may with wine or strong drink. Any of these will overpower his reason and senses, and put him beyond himself. The master-feeling will prevail, whatever it is, and when it once gets the upper hand, will rage the more violently in proportion to the obstacles it has to encounter. Women who associate with robbers are cruel, as soon as they get over their first repugnance: some of the bravest officers have been the greatest Martinets. A man who is afraid of a blow, or tender of his person, will yet, on being struck, feel nothing but the mortification of the affront, and the fear of discomfiture. The pain that is inflicted, after his blood is once up, will only aggravate his resentment, and be diverted from the channels of fear into those of rage and shame. He

1 There is a common inversion of this opinion, which is desperation; or the becoming reckless of all consequences, poverty, disease, or death, from disappointment in some one thing that the mind is set upon, no matter what. A man who has been jilted of his first choice marries out of spite the first woman he meets. A girl, whose sweetheart goes to sea, because she will not have him, as soon as he is gone, and she is baulked of her fancy, runs a-muck at ruin and infamy'As men should serve a cucumber,

She throws herself away!'

Losing gamesters act nearly on the same infatuated principle. Harrel, in Cecilia, makes a fine hair-brained mock-heroic exit. I declare I prefer it to the termination of Gray's Bard. Gamesters and highwaymen are so far heroes that it is neck or nothing with them: they set consequences at defiance. Their actions are disinterested; but their motives are not so. A fortune-hunting General stands much in the same predicament. The abstracted, the ideal, is necessary to the true heroic. But before a man can fight for an idea, he must have an idea in his head to fight for. Now there are some Generals that are not understood to possess this qualification of the heroic character.

whose will is roused and holds out in this way, whose tenaciousness of purpose and inflammability of spirit are proof against the extremity of pain, of fatigue, and disaster, is said to have pluck. So a man may not be able to reason himself into coolness at the commencement of a battle; but a ball whizzing near him does it, by abstracting his imagination from a thousand idle fears, and fixing it on his immediate situation and duty. The novice in an engagement, that before was motionless with apprehension or trembling like a leaf, after being hit, loses the sense of possible contingencies in the grief of his wound, and fights like a devil incarnate. He is thenceforward too busy to think of himself. He rushes fearlessly on danger and on death. A man in a battle is indeed emphatically beside himself. He 'bears a charmed life,' that in fancy disarms cannon-balls and bullets of their power to hurt. They are mere names and apparitions from which astonishment and necessity have taken out the sting: the sense of feeling is seared and dead for the time to all mortal consequences.' The mind is sublimated to a disregard of whatever can happen, and tempted to rush without provocation on its fate, purely out of bravado, and as the triumph of its paramount feeling, an exasperation of its temporary insanity. Courage is in many such cases only a violent effort to shake off fear, a determination of the imagination to seize on any object that may divert its present dread. A soldier is a perfect hero but that he is a mere machine. He is drilled into disinterestedness, and beaten into courage. He is a very patriotic and romantic automaton. He has lost all regard for himself and concern for others. His life, his limbs, his soul and body, are obedient only to the word of command. 'Set duty in one eye and

death in the other, and he can look on death indifferently.'

'Set but a Scotsman on a hill,

Say such is royal George's will,
And there's the foe:

His only thought is how to kill
Twa' at a blow.'-Burns.

They then go at it with bayonets fixed, eyes inflamed, and tongues lolling out with heat and rage, like wild beasts or mad dogs panting for blood, and from the madman to Mr. Wordsworth's happy warrior' there is but one step.-The true hero devotes himself in the same way, but he does it of his own accord, and from an inward sentiment. The service on which he is bound is perfect freedom. He is not a machine, but a free agent. He knows his cue without a prompter. Not servile duty

'Within his bosom reigns another lord,
Honour, sole judge and umpire of itself.'

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