Page images
PDF
EPUB

the French vocabulary of horror, and to the and abhorrence, such as we might fling at his French vocabulary of baseness. It is not brethren, Hébert and Fouquier Tinville, and easy to give a notion of his conduct in the Carrier and Lebon. We have no pleasure Convention, without using those emphatic in seeing human nature thus degraded. We terms, guillotinade, noyade, fusillade, mitrail-turn with disgust from the filthy and spitelade. It is not easy to give a notion of his ful Yahoos of the fiction; and the filthiest conduct under the Consulate and the Em- and most spiteful Yahoo of the fiction was pire, without borrowing such words as mou-a noble creature when compared with the chard and mouton.

Barère of history. But what is no pleasure, We therefore like his invectives against us M. Hippolyte Carnot has made a duty. It is much better than any thing else that he has no light thing that a man in high and honorable written; and dwell on them, not merely with public trust, a man who, from his connections complacency, but with a feeling akin to grat- and position, may not unnaturally be suppositude. It was but little that he could do to ed to speak the sentiments of a large class promote the honor of our country; but that of his countrymen, should come forward to little he did strenuously and constantly. demand approbation for a life, black with Renegade, traitor, slave, coward, liar, slan- every sort of wickedness, and unredeemed derer, murderer, hack writer, police-spy-by a single virtue. This M. Hippolyte Carthe one small service which he could render not has done. By attempting to enshrine to England, was to hate her; and such as he was may all who hate her be!

We cannot say that we contemplate with equal satisfaction that fervent and constant zeal for religion, which, according to M. Hippolyte Carnot, distinguished Barère; for, as we think that whatever brings dishonor on religion is a serious evil, we had, we own, indulged a hope that Barère was an atheist. We now learn, however, that he was at no time even a skeptic, that he adhered to his faith through the whole Revolution, and that he has left several manuscript works on divinity. One of these is a pious treatise, entitled, An'Of Christianity and of its Influence.' other consists of meditations on the Psalms, which will doubtless greatly console and edify the Church.

This makes the character complete. Whatsoever things are false, whatsoever things are dishonest, whatsoever things are unjust, whatsoever things are impure, whatsoever things are hateful, whatsoever things are of evil report, if there be any vice, and if there be any infamy, all these things, we knew, were blended in Barère. But one thing was still wanting, and that M. Hippolyte Carnot has supplied. When to such an assemblage of qualities a high profession of piety is added, the effect becomes overpowering. We sink under the contemplation of such exquisite and manifold perfection; and feel, with deep humility, how presumptuous it was in us to think of composing the legend of this beatified athlete of the faith, Saint Bertrand of the Carmagnoles.

Something more we had to say about him. But let him go. We did not seek him out, and will not keep him longer. If those who call themselves his friends had not forced him on our notice, we should never have vouchsafed to him more than a passing word of scorn

this Jacobin carrion, he has forced us to gibbet it; and we venture to say that, from the eminence of infamy on which we have placed it, he will not easily take it down.

LOVE ON.

BY ELIZA COOK.

From the New Monthly Magazine.

Love not, love not, ye hapless sons of earth. MRS. NORTON.
LOVE on, love on, the soul must have a shrine,

The rudest breast must find some hallow'd spot;
The God who form'd us left no spark divine
In him who dwells on earth, yet loveth not.
Devotion's links compose a sacred chain
The world with selfish rust and reckless stain,
Of holy brightness and unmeasured length;
May mar its beauty, but not touch its strength.
Love on, love on,-ay, even though the heart

We fondly build on proveth like the sand;
Though one by one Faith's corner-stones depart,
And even Hope's last pillar fails to stand;
Though we may dread the lips we once believed,
And know their falsehood shadows all our days,
Who would not rather trust and be deceived,

Than own the mean, cold spirit that betrays?
Love on, love on, though we may live to see

The dear face whiter than its circling shroud,
Though dark and dense the gloom of death may be,
Affection's glory yet shall pierce the cloud.
The truest spell that Heaven can give to lure,
The sweetest prospect Mercy can bestow,
Is the blest thought that bids the soul be sure

'Twill meet above the things it loved below.

Love on, love on, Creation breathes the words,

Their mystic music ever dwells around;
The strain is echo'd by unnumber'd chords,

And gentlest bosoms yield the fullest sound.
As flowers keep springing, though their dazzling

bloom

Is oft put forth for worms to feed upon;
So hearts, though wrung by traitors and the tomb,
Shall still be precious and shall still love on.

THE MONK CAMPANNELLA AND HIS
WORKS.

From Fraser's Magazine.

tivity, deprived of books, cut off from correspondence, without knowing what was passing in the world from which he was exiled. This monk predicted exactly, from 1598, all the calamities reserved by Providence for the great Spanish monarchy; and his predictions were dated from the very epoch when Europe, the two Americas, and Africa, bowed together before the son of Charles V. By a most extraordinary power of deduction and penetration, the prophet discovers the whole series of effects that are hidden in the bosom of their primitive causes, and reads the future methodically and distinctly as if it were developed before him in the present. Behold genius of the most powerful kind: yet I do not know that it was remarked by any one. Poor man, he only besought one favor, which was, that he might go and preach in Flanders, and teach philosophy to its inhabitants. He had a vague hope that Philip II. would some day grant him an audi

ubi et quando majestati tuæ placuerit." He sent his treatise, or political letter, to the king, through the medium of I do not know what Spanish excellency, who did not possess credit or benevolence enough to obtain the audience, far less the favor solicited by the monk. No notice what

He was

not surprised at the circumstance; he was acquainted with the chances of life, the impotency of truth, and the folly of wishing to convince stubbornness or interestedness. Habent sua fata libelli," says he, in terminating his pamhlet:

WHATEVER is superior to common wisdom has always been treated as folly; and, notwithstanding that in every age we meet with innovators who, grieving at human misery, have wished to improve the condition of man, and, in their anxiety to conquer indifference, have not feared to face persecution and to suffer martyr dom, history is yet full of their sufferings. Giordano Bruno and Savonarole are burnt alive by the Inquisition; Campanella languishes twentyseven years in a dungeon; Roger Bacon is incarcerated on suspicion of witchcraft; Harrington dies by poison; Hall is deprived of all his property; Ramus perishes assassinated. Nevertheless, inspiration is so palpable in these freethinkers, their mission is so formal, and their ob-ence. "Magna et secreta colloquio tuo reservo, ject so righteous, that they triumph over all impediments, over all tortures, and all perils. What ought to be said is said; each age gives its protestation to the world, which continues, and is transmitted from one generation to another. The great family of Utopistes vary, but never cease. In the meantime, humanity profits by their inves-ever was taken of his communication. tigations. They do not agitate themselves round a fatal circle without hope; they continue their upward movement slow and majestic on this mysterious ladder, the invisible degrees of which unite man to God, earth to heaven. It would be curious to make an historical and philosophical "I abandon this work to its fate; it is badly examination into those modern social systems written, and a little confused. But I was ill, unwhich are the most remarkable for the daring bold- happy in prison, in tuguriolo angusto, and I ness of their conception, or for the extraordinary could do no better. It is sufficient that Spain singularity of their execution. Thus would al- sees what threatens her, and what may serve ternately pass before our eyes the Chancellor her. Keep, then, well the secrets which I conBacon and his Nora Atlantica; Moore and his fide to you; by and by they will value my proUtopia; Daniel De Foe and his Essay of Prophecies more than were valued the leaves of the jects; Hall and his Mundus Alter; Fénélon and his Salente; the Abbé de St. Pierre and his Dream of Perpetual Peace; Morelly and his Basiliade, for a long time attributed to Diderot; Retif de la Bretonne and his Découverte Australe; the Calabrian monk Campanella and his Civitas Solis, fanciful creation, full of grandeur. Sometimes the inspiration is so fortunate, that the phi losopher sets himself free from the ties that bind him to his age, and attains, by a sort of foreknowledge, social forms which have been realized in after-generations. We will let others solve these problems, which the human mind has followed from age to age for the general welfare. We will give to our readers some insight into the destinies of one of these philosophers, the circumstances attending which are very remarka-ideas without comprehending their elevation.

ble.

In the year 1598, when Philip II. reigned, master of Naples, of America, of Oran, of the Duchy of Milan, of Rousillon, of Navarre, of Franche Comté, of the Cape de Verd Islands, a monk, a native of Calabria, who had a great genius, and. the rarest of all, the gift of prophetic wisdom. wrote him a long letter in Latin, from the prison in which he was immured, wherein he enumerated all the causes of the Spanish decadency. He wrote this letter in the gloomy depths of a dungeon, after having suffered torture, after ten years' cap

sybils."

But posterity was as ungrateful and as tyrannical towards Campanella as Philip II. had been. Italy, his country, in its full decline, smothered all genius greater than itself. Punished by the age and his fellow-citizens, Campanella's fate was that of a giant shut up in a box. Chastised when living by executioners and gaolers, chastised after his death by a celebrity so ill-defined that philosophers alone are acquainted with it, he added a great name and an enormous injustice, to the list of iniquities which we call history. He came to die in France, where the easy kindness of men's feelings and manners softened his latter years. Courtiers and men of letters, alike caustic and skeptical, admired the boldness of his

He was well received; Pereisc folded him in his arms; Gabriel Naude, the founder of the Mazarin library, chose him for a particular friend. This kindness astonished him, a lacrymis non temperavi. We must render this justice to France, that she has always shown sympathy for exiles, for mental superiority, and misfortunes. In the political counsels given by him to Spain in 1598, we discover a rare union of the wisdom of Montesquieu, Machiavel, and Bacon. Time has fulfilled his prophecies, and we can judge of him who made them.

This Venetian was a man of talent who performed his mass without much belief in it, served his master, attacked the pope, and perpetually courting the world, the great, the people, posterity, and history, obtained the comforts of life, renown, and the pageant of glory. Campanella, poor simple man! saw clearer, saw more, saw fur

The isolation and pride of the Spanish race | young, flourishing, glowing with health, glory, appeared to Campanella the primitive cause of and happiness, and he sees death written in charits ruin. It is, in reality, to this double princi-acters which he alone can decipher. For he had ple, and to its mutual reaction, that we must at- no flatterers, no party, no disciples; he stood abtribute, even from its very origin, the rapid decline solutely alone. Even Fra Paolo-the Venetian of the power founded by Ferdinand the Catholic. so little the friend of Spain-thinks that Philip and raised to such a high pitch by Charles V. II. will transform " Africa and Europe into slaves, "Do not allow," says the philosopher, "the and Paris into a hamlet." race to be impoverished, from want of intermixing and foreign alliances; favor all marriages which will cause the Spanish blood to run in the veins of strangers, and that your nobles and your capitains marry Flemings and Germans. Strive in every way against the proud custom of the Spaniards, who, at Naples and elsewhere, only seek women of their own nation for wives; en-ther, than all his contemporaries; and this grand courage, protect the sympathetic fusion of Spain with other nations. Hispani odiosi plerisque nationibus. The Spaniards are detested, although imitated, and it is this that must be prevented; their dress, their language, their fashions, are adopted every where, but their stately manners, their pompous titles, their affectation in putting themselves forward in all public places wherever they may be, is not to be borne. 'Fastuosos tibulos, cum ambitione primum loeum in conventibus occupandi, et exquisito nimis incessu." To compensate, they have courage, fortitude, and eloquence-great qualities. You will never change them, their obstinacy of spirit can never bend to foreign customs. In order to preserve the existence of Spain, you must endeavor to induce foreigners to bend to Spanish customs. 'Cæteri in illorum mores transeant, instar arborum, quæ aliis inseruntur.'"

[ocr errors]

vision, this enormous penetration into human things, this intuition of truths, present and to come, touching him deeply, he spread them abroad, in spite of himself, he communicated them without knowing why; and the high intellectual eminence attained to by Campanellathe Bacon of Italy-is no creation of the fancy. It is not that he wanted ambition; such men know full well what they are, and what they are worth, and with what sight God has gifted them. But ambition such as his needed a state of society wherein to exercise itself, altogether different from that by which he was surrounded. Italy could boast of conquerors, poets, abbés, and cantatrices, but not of a liberalized society. What would she, then, have done with Campanella? What signified to her his systems, his taxes, direct and indirect, his plan of surveys, his practical improvements? What, also, would Spain have done with this man and his theories? Spain was rotting in the track of luxury, of war, of superstition, and usurpation, that she had traced for herself. The nation never listens but to the voice that flatters-that is to say, deceives it. Happy the men of genius born in their own proper epoch! happy those who come neither too soon nor too late! happy they who to produce some effect on the blind mass, are not obliged to relax their conscience, to annihilate their instinct, and to flatter the whims, or vices of the age. Campanella did not suspect that he was born two hundred years too soon.

Campanella sees at a glance the disasters which will spring from this pride of isolation. It will be of no avail that they are brave, and make war with the whole world; they will perish in the combat, their losses will never be repaired, their armies will not be renewed, their diminished battalions will become at last extinct. Agriculture and commerce, debased, will no longer nourish the state with their abundant produce. The neighboring nations will inherit the monopoly of their riches. "Already," says the monk, "the arts of life languish, abandoned by Spain, and no nation can prosper without manufactures, husbandry, and commerce." These "See," says he to Philip II. "how your barSpaniards, who perform great actions, are ons and lords, in impoverishing your subjects, too proud to write of them. "Commemorata impoverish yourself. They go elsewhere as vicedignissima præstiterint facta, qualia sunt tot roys and capitains, to spend their money in folly, marium circuitiones, tot insularum et continen- to make to themselves creatures of their will, and tium detectiones, et (quod maximum omnium est to ruin themselves in voluptuousness; then, ipsius novi mundi repertio) nemini tamen idoneo when by their luxury and ostentation they are hoc negotii dederunt, ut gesta sua, Græcorum reduced to misery, they return to Spain to mend atque Romanorum gesta multis modis superan- their fortunes, taking at every hand, pillaging tia descripta, et ad posteros transmissa, æter-right and left, enriching themselves afresh, and nitatis memoriæ consecraret." Those who have recommencing the same trade to the end of their discovered a world have never given themselves lives. They seize the slightest pretext, to subthe trouble of writing about it. In 1588, Cam-ject the people to their exactions, they invent new panella foresees that this will alone condemn ones every day, they have a thousand ways of Spain; 1588 shows him 1840. The glory of extorting from and exhausting the poor. DegluSpain during the sixteenth century does not daz- bendi miseros subditos." zle him. By an astonishing acuteness of judgment, and a miraculous foresight, he comprehends that, without a complete reform, Spain is lost; and, if she will submit to it, he promises her the crown of the world. Campanella, many centuries before the event, examines this body,

By such means you may obtain glory and conquests, the one dazzling, the other fleeting; one may arrive, like Spain, to the summit of power, but one cannot maintain one's footing; one may grasp at the universal monarchy, only to be crushed. Lasting success is founded on the art

of preservation, which is the most difficult of all, | disabled soldiers, a school especially for young because it requires judgment, prudence, and seamen, the foundation of an institution reserved genius. The world admires the violent more for the daughters of soldiers at the public expense, than the skilled, the innovators more than the are indicated in his extraordinary book; and his conservatives, the torrents which fall from high violent and ardent imagination has unhappily places more than the streams that flow in wide mixed with this good advice a thousand astrolosheets. But that which is steady, which is dura-gical reveries, as well as a countless number of ble, is more beautiful, more grand, more useful, schemes which are quite startling. For examthan a quantity of fortuitous rain; "flumina per-ple, he advises the king to lend to the people ennia nobiliora torrentibus ex fortuitis pluviis collectis." If you wish for durability, abandon insolent pride, and alleviate the distress of the people. On this last point Campanella precedes his own age, perhaps ours, and gives excellent

advice.

without usury, dato pignore, which is nothing else than the establishment of a great pawningoffice, and that he would fund the money of his subjects, rendering them account of the capital and interest (servata fide), which resembles greatly the savings-bank system of modern times. He recommends the keeping up of a fine navy; "For," says he, eloquently, "the key of the sea is the key of the world." In forming his Theory on Colonization, he warns Philip II. against folwant of patience, steadiness, and perseverance, have destroyed the results of their courage. These words, which we translate literally, deserve to be well meditated on at the present time:

"The French, incapable of moderation abroad, too impatient and indiscreet, arrogating too much to themselves on the one hand, on the other giving too much liberty to their subjects, treating them to-day with easy good-nature, tomorrow with harsh rigor, have never been able to constitute solidly their colonies. They have acquired many possessions, and have lost them all (cum multa acquisiverint nihil servaverunt')."

He calls the attention of the king to the unequal distribution of the taxes, the poor supporting the whole weight of them, which is iniquitous; that the nobility free themselves from them at the expense of the middle classes, the middle clas-lowing the example of the French, who, by their ses at the expense of the tradesmen and laborers. In fact, the rich are precisely those who pay nothing. He, therefore, proposes the establishment of a just tax, not heavy, on the lower classes, and properly distributed. What he invents is nothing more or less than the system of our direct and indirect taxes. He puts a tax on oil, wine, and meat, but only a slight tax, as being articles of necessity; the most considerable is levied on articles of luxury, on cards, on tobacco, on places of public amusement. "Vectigal exigatur pro necessariis rebus parvum, pro superfluis largius." He rejects the poll-tax, and establishes the principal fund of his contributions on the value of landed property. "Non ulla bona quam certa et stabilia graventur." He leaves to the con- He quotes on the subject of conquests,-Nasumption, the luxury and factitious wants of the ples, Milan, and Genoa. He wishes men's rich, the care of defraying the rest of the contri- minds to be diverted from theological subtilties, butions; all this is pointed out as a settled max- and that they should be directed towards the im in the art of government a hundred and fifty study of geography, of the actual living world, years before Mirabeau the elder, two hundred and of history. It is curious to trace the resembefore Napoleon Buonaparte and Adam Smith. blance that occurs between his system of social This is the man whom Philip II. would not lis-organization and that of Napoleon. Both are ten to, who was left to rot twenty-seven years in founded on a legal code, on the abolition of the the dungeons of Naples, who in his time had not rights of birth, and family, and station. Both the least political credit, and who certainly un- threw open the avenues of distinction to merit derstood more of the welfare and prosperity of wherever it may be found, and stimulate, by the kings and nations than all the great politicans of prospect of honor, to exertion in the public serFrance and Spain, the cruel and artful Cather- vice. He strikes, indeed, at the very roots of ine, the atrocious Duke of Alba, the impudent Spanish society, as in his day it existed. He Leon X., and even the good Sully. No one that recommends the reduction of monks to a certain I know of has paid the least regard to these limited number, a permanent war against the truths, so largely emitted by Thomas Campa- Mahommedans, and the foundation of bazars or nella, and which fall like a free and vast cascade factories, and naval schools on every important from his ingenious mind. This man, of such a point of the globe,-at the Canary Islands, Sicipractical genius, passed for a sort of vain talker.ly, St. Domingo, and the Cape of Good Hope; When the honest bookseller of Amsterdam, the encouragement of manufactures, and of Louis Elzevir, embellished the work in question (1610) with a preface after his own manner, he ridiculed in good Latin this monk who would judge every thing, reform every thing, arrange every thing his own way, "Reges et subditos suo subjicere nutui," and prescribe laws to mankind. Homo ut magni ingenii, ita non nisi magna, et a vocatione suâ aliena, spirantis:" -Ardent genius, which was only bent on grand designs, and these the most foreign to his voca

tion.

Campanella gives many other counsels to his monarch. The establishment of hospitals for

public workshops; preferable, says he, to mines of gold and silver (metallifodinis potiora). Complete this vast system, which the English aristocracy has partly realized. How dared a prisoner tell these truths to Spain-to his king? By the exercise of a rare ingenuity, by promis ing to his master that of which the latter was ambitious, a universal monarchy, and connecting it with the adoption of plans which aimed at a far nobler object. And this it was which deceived the literary men of an after age, and induced them not to notice either Campanella, or his treatise on Spain. They could perceive

With which my thirst I slake;
His curse has made me know I dream,
And feel I cannot wake.

the immediate end at which he appeared to | He turns to liquid fire the stream
aim, though the philosophy that was hidden un-
der his system proved too deep for them.
They praised his boldness, put missed the very
point where praise was due. How prophetic
are the following sentences, with which, for the
present, we close our notice of a man, than
whom few ages have produced any more re-
markable!

"The future age will renew every thing in society; there will first be destruction, then reconstruction, a new monarchy, and a complete reformation of the laws. 'Sæculo venturo reformatio legum, artium prius evelli et extirpari, deinde ædificari:'-Every thing announces it to us, especially the wonderful discovery of the magnet, of printing, of gunpowder (inventionis mirifica, &c.), telescopes, &c. &c. We have made more histories and written more books in a hundred years than our ancestors have written in four or five thousand. Nothing is a barrier to the freedom of mankind." And to prove this indestructible force of human liberty, proceeding in great mystery in the walks of providence, he adds a sentence relating to his own life which appears to us sublime:

"How can one stop the free progress of mankind, when eight-and-forty hours of torture could not bring under subjection the will of a poor philosopher, and extort from him the least word of what he wished to keep secret?" This philosopher was himself.

LINES,

SISTER.

The light delusive of your mind

Lent lustre to the stone-
The features in yon glass you find,
Poor sister, are your own.

MANIAC.

With lyre and with white array

Are you an angel come?
Your tears may wash the stains away

Which hide from me your home.
Hark you!-a beauteous flower I grew,
Budded upon a thorn ;

And summer winds more sweetly blew,
In joy that I was born.

But noisome weeds the thorn rose round-
They darkened my parterre;
The canker-worm my bosom found,

Which then was loveliest there.
From my own branch a sweet bud shot,
More beautiful than me;

Fierce rays and fast rains injured not—
I was its canopy.

A

baleful breeze came whispering by

Come, place thee on my wing,
I'll bear thee where the worm will die
Which mars thy blossoming."

I left the bud to sun and storm,

Borne thence, that breeze's prey,
Which tore my breast and left the worm
To gnaw my heart away.

SISTER, STRIKES THE HARP.

Your unkind husband failed to prize,
Your lover false beguiled-

Sister, this music soothed the cries
Of your deserted child.

MANIAC.

Suggested by a Picture of a Maniac with cards and pebbles Ha! touch those chords-that voice-that name

strewed around her, and her Sister at her harp by her side.

BY MRS. DALKEITH HOLMES.

From the Dublin University Magazine.

MANIAC.

WHO strikes the chord-who wakes the strain?
Is the long darkness past-

Its spectral shapes, its burning pain:

Am I in heaven at last?

No! the fiend comes-the strains cease now;

Not so in seraph land,

Nor there his breath would scald my brow,
His grasp would ice my hand:

His face is in the mirror there

Whene'er I turn to see,

With furrowed brow and matted hair,
And wild eyes mocking me:

Once when I thought he was not nigh,
I built a palace tall,

The scattered cards which round me lie
Were stonework of the hall.
My magic gems which virtue bore,
The saddest breast to cheer,

He changed to pebbles of the shore,
Each shining with a tear.

I heard them once in mirth,
When both of us a place dared claim

Beside our father's hearth.
See you my injured husband frown,
My bleeding lover fall?—

My child from heaven look smiling down,
Reproaching more than all?

More music, more-it cools my brow,
It clears my brain's dark sleep,

I know my shame and nature now,
A woman's-for I weep.

Those tears-oh! they are God's own boon-
With them life ebbs away;

I hope to be an angel soon,
For, Sister, I can pray.

MDLLE FANNY ELSSLER has addressed a letter to the Débats, declaring that certain articles, published periodically at London, under the title of Fanny Elssler at Havannah, were not written by her, and that they are calculated to seriously injure her, from the ridiculous turn of the language, and the inexactitude of the facts.-Ath.

« PreviousContinue »