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CHAPTER XI.

CLARENDON, BUNYAN, AND LOCKE.

Clarendon's Life-History of the Rebellion-Characters-John Bunyan-The Pilgrim's Progress--Allegory--Style--Life of Bunyan--Locke--The New Philosophy--Practical Character of Locke's Works--Life-Letters on Toleration--Essay on the Human Understanding--Theory of Ideas-Treatises on Government--Essays on Education.

IN the same manner as the external character of the scenery of any country is reflected in the fine arts which flourish there, do the great and stirring periods of history tend to produce the talent by which alone they can be worthily commemorated and described the savage grandeur of the Calabrian mountains and the sunny loveliness of the plains of Romagna are not more certainly the suggestive cause of Salvator's wild sublimity or Claude's romantic grace, than the rout of Xerxes was of the patriotic fervour of the Eschylean tragedy, or the Peloponnesian War of the profound political philosophy of Thucydides. We cannot therefore wonder that the great Civil War in England, the Republic, the Protectorate, and the Restoration—a period so crowded with events, and so full of intense dramatic interest-should have produced a historian worthy of describing the mighty revolutions which were to exercise so extensive and enduring, an influence upon the future fortunes of Great Britain.

These events were sufficiently striking and important to have inspired even an ordinary intellect: a narration tolerably faithful and detailed, and executed by a common hand, could not fail to possess a strong and lasting interest. How fortunate are we, then, to have a history of this busy period, executed by a man not only endowed with extraordinary powers of intellect, but one who was himself a principal actor in the occurrences he describes! This was Edward Hyde, afterwards Earl of Clarendon and Lord Chancellor of England. His work is invaluable for more reasons than one. It contains a minute account of a period of peculiar importance in the constitutional history of the country, was the production of a distinguished lawyer and statesman, himself in a position to enjoy unusual opportunities for obtaining accurate and extensive information, and personally acquainted with many of the most distinguished men of the time; it is much more free from partiality and prejudice than could be reasonably expected

under the circumstances, and is, above all, written in that easy and colloquial style which is best adapted to recount the events, without depriving them of their natural power of interesting and amusing the reader. Hyde was born in 1608, and, after studying at Oxford, devoted himself to the profession of the law, in * which he soon distinguished himself so far as to attract the notice of the famous Laud. Being a man of considerable fortune, he now abandoned (in 1640) the practice of his profession, entered parliament, and commenced a political and literary career. He appears, after some hesitation, to have joined the royalist party, and became one of the most wise and trusty advisers of the unfortunate monarch, whose contentions with his parliament and people were so soon to end in the destruction of his throne, the loss of his life, and the expatriation of his family. Though professing monarchic and constitutional opinions, Hyde never pushed them to that pitch of extravagance which caused the temporary ruin of the monarchy; and if the vacillating and infatuated Charles had yielded to the advice of his moderate and sensible minister, the fatal catastrophe might perhaps have been avoided; for the English people has ever been distinguished, as a body, for its firm attachment to monarchical institutions; its cry has been, in all ages, when its true sentiments have been able to secure free expression, that of the barons of King John-"Nolumus leges Angliæ mutari." But it was not to be so in the present instance: Charles I. was destined to pursue the fatal path traced out for him by a mistaken (however sincere) notion of his own prerogative; the nation was to be precipitated into twenty years of bloodshed and tyranny, and Providence was to give a terrible lesson to all infatuated kings and to all rebellious peoples. Hyde, who had been made Chancellor of the Exchequer, and raised to the dignity of knighthood, now quitted the king at Oxford, and accompanied Prince Charles to the west of England, and afterwards to the island of Jersey, where he remained for two years, occupied in writing an account of the events in which he had been engaged. This was probably the happiest and most tranquil period of his life. In 1648 he again joined the prince in Holland, from whence he was sent to Madrid on a mission to the court of Spain. This embassy-the object of which was to induce Spain to interfere actively in behalf of the exiled house of Stuart was totally ineffectual; so much so, indeed, that Hyde and his companions were ultimately ordered to quit the country. The subject of our remarks now rejoined his wife and family, whom he had left at Antwerp; and after passing some time there in extreme distress, and even destitution, he again returned to his unfortunate master, who was now at Paris. From this period till the Restoration, Hyde continued to perform for the royal exile

those services which none but a very wise and faithful adherent could have rendered, which the carelessness, profligacy, and extravagance of the second Charles's character made so necessary, and which no gratitude could repay. He watched over the finan

cial affairs of the king and his ragged little court, gave continual advice, frequently as unpalatable as it was wise, and keeping up by every means in his power the sometimes precarious harmony, and still more precarious respectability, of the little band of gentlemen who surrounded the king. Charles, to whom Hyde must have appeared in the light in which a dissipated youth of ruined family regards a severe but faithful steward, expressed his gratitude to him by naming him Chancellor, a dignity which at that time was productive rather of danger and annoyance than either profit or power. At the Restoration he began to receive the solid and merited recompense for his services and privations. He was now the first officer of the crown, and had reached the highest dignity which a subject can attain. His daughter, by marrying the Duke of York, became closely allied to the royal family of England; and at the coronation, in 1661, Hyde was created Earl of Clarendon, and presented with 20,000l. For some time he continued to be one of the king's chief advisers; and it is allowed by politicians of all parties that his counsels were distinguished for their sagacity and their moderation. But he soon began to incur the dislike not only of the court, but of the nation. The former were jealous of him for the severity of his morals, for his opposition to the extravagance and profligacy of the times, which must have made Clarendon a perpetual contrast and reproach to the society of that day; and the people, still in the fervour of loyalty, and probably jealous of the great wealth and aggrandisement of Hyde and his family, were but too apt to echo the sentiments of the court. He was compelled to resign the Great Seal, and forced, by the ingratitude of the sovereign for whom he had done so much, to leave the country. He retired to France, where he employed the closing years of his life in composing his invaluable history. He died in 1674. His History of the Great Rebellion' was written entirely from personal recollections, and in that style which is best adapted to relate personal recollections with effect. It is perfectly natural and easy; and thus the strange and romantic adventures of the king are recounted in a manner which not only renders them more impressive and amusing, but convinces the reader of the narrator's good faith and accuracy. Absolutely impartial in every case it is not, and it could not be ; but it has always been considered, and with justice, as the most faithful and comprehensive account we possess of the interesting events it commemorates. The style has some defects of prolixity and want of clearness; but it is a work to which the reader re

turns again and again with renewed pleasure and profit, not only from the immense mass of information it contains, but from the vigorous, sagacious, manly, and honourable tone of thought which pervades it. It abounds in minute and complete characters of public men. We are hardly apt to appreciate all the penetration displayed in these, as we consider them, in the reading, to be simply a recapitulation of the historian's observations; and we do not at first perceive the quiet sagacity with which this great intellectual portrait-painter has concentrated his attention upon those traits which constitute the individuality of the subject, neglecting, or rather judiciously subduing, those features which are not so marked and characteristic. As, in examining the living likenesses of Titian and Vandyke, a spectator unacquainted with the practical details and practical difficulties of the art will find his impressions of the painter's genius absolutely weakened by the very ease and facility of the execution, so it may be said that the apparent naturalness and simplicity of Clarendon's narrative are apt at first to diminish our feeling of the difficulty of his task, and of the skill with which he has executed it. "Clarendon," says Hallam," is excellence in everything that he has performed with care; his characters are beautifully delineated; his sentiments have often a noble gravity, which the length of his periods, far too great in itself, seems to befit; but in the general course of his narration he is negligent of grammar and perspicuity, with little choice of words, and therefore sometimes idiomatic without ease or elegance."

Besides his excellent History, Clarendon has left us, not to speak of a great number of state papers, written in a manner seldom equalled for dignity and weight, a few other works, several of which remained unpublished and unknown till a considerable time after his death, when they were printed, and have much contributed to establish his fame as a great writer, and as a wise and virtuous man. That which is likely to possess the most universal interest is a dissertation on the comparative happiness and usefulness of an active or a contemplative life. It is an irresistible argument in favour of the former: and Clarendon's own busy and patriotic existence is a complete confirmation of the proposition maintained by his vigorous logic.

We have more than once taken occasion to remark that in every sound, durable, and healthy literature, there will always be found a large number of illustrious names, of men sprung from the middle and lower, and even the humblest, ranks of society: and this phenomenon will be more frequent, obviously, in proportion as the literature in question is of a vaster and more allembracing character, the expression of national sympathies and feelings, and speaking loudly and clearly to the national heart.

To the glory of England it must be said, that the vernacular literature of no civilized nation in ancient or modern times can show so long and so splended a list of men rising from the humbler classes of citizens, and eternising their own age and their country's greatness by triumphs of valour, of wisdom, and of genius. Among these, not the least remarkable is John Bunyan, whose career was as extraordinary as his origin was low, or as his productions are inimitable and original. There is perhaps hardly any European language which does not possess a version or a paraphrase of the Pilgrim's Progress'-that wonderful fiction, in which a religious allegory is conveyed with an effect absolutely heightened by the very qualities of style which at first sight we should consider would be most likely to injure its impressiveness, by an unequalled simplicity and even rudeness of language, and by a bold directness of metaphor and a fearless literalness of parable which no other work, we think, exhibits.

The subject of this romance (for it partakes of the elements of romantic fiction) is a delineation of the trials, temptations, struggles, and ultimate triumph of a Christian, in his progress from a life of sin to eternal felicity, typified under the Golden City, or the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse. These adventures are all parables; and the hero, Christian, his friends and enemies-in short, all the personages of the drama―are more or less of the same character, personifications of abstract qualities, the follies, the vices, the fears, the hopes, the virtues, and the failings of religious humanity. So far we have nothing more than the ordinary materials of apologue and allegory. In what then consists the peculiar charm of this strange and original fiction-a charm which renders the rude pages of Bunyan as familiar and delightful to a child as they are attractive to the less impressionable mind of critical manhood? It is the homely earnestness, the idiomatic vigour of the style; it is the fearless straightforwardness of the conceptions, and the inexhaustible richness of imagery and adventure. Drawing all his materials from the Scriptures and from the vivid and intense recollections of his own spiritual career, the wonderful tinker seems to recount the adventures of his hero with a simple eagerness and good faith which annihilate our consciousness of the intervention of a book between the author and the reader: we seen to be sitting beside him as he labours at his “tagged laces" in the jail of Bedford, and we listen with the willing attention and the absorbing wonder of a child hearkening to its nurse's fairy-tale. Indeed, the very rudeness of the style, with its rough idiomaticism, its picturesque rustic earnestness, and the strong tinge of Scriptural phraseology, brings us involuntarily back to the age of infancy-the age of belief. In the painting of the multitude of characters which crowd the action of his strange drama,

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