The history of all the world tells us, that immoral means will ever intercept good ends. Enlist the interests of stern morality and religious enthusiasm in the cause of political liberty, as in the time of the old Puritans, and it will be irresistible; but the Jacobins played the whole game of religion, and morals, and domestic happiness into the hands of the aristocrats. Thank God! that they did so. England was saved from civil war by their enormous, their providential, blundering. Can a politician, a statesman, slight the feelings and the convictions of the whole matronage of his country? The women are as influential upon such national interests as the men. Horne Tooke was always making a butt of Godwin; who, nevertheless, had that in him which Tooke could never have understood. I saw a good deal of Tooke at one time: he left upon me the impression of his being a keen, iron man. May 9. 1830. PERSIAN AND ARABIC POETRY.-MILESIAN TALES. I MUST acknowledge I never could see much merit in the Persian poetry, which I have read in translation. There is not a ray of Imagination in it, and but a glimmering of Fancy. It is, in fact, so far as I know, deficient in truth. Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least. Arabian poetry is a different thing. I cannot help surmising that there is a good deal of Greek fancy in the Arabian Nights' Tales. No doubt we have had a great loss in the Milesian Tales.* The book of Job is pure Arab poetry of the highest and most antique cast. *The Milesiacs were so called, because written or composed by Aristides of Miletus, and also because the scene of all or most of them was placed in that rich and luxurious city. Harpocration cites the sixth book of this collection. Nothing, I believe, is now known of the age or history of this Aristides, except what may be inferred from the fact that Lucius Cornelius Sisenna translated the tales into Latin, as we learn from Ovid: - Junxit Aristides Milesia crimina secum and afterwards, Vertit Aristidem Sisenna, nec obfuit illi Fasti, ii. 412-443. and also from the incident mentioned in the Plutarchian life of Crassus, that after the defeat at Carrhæ, a copy of the Milesiacs of Aristides was found in the baggage of a Roman officer, and that Surena (who, by the by, if history has not done him injustice, was not a man to be over scrupulous in such a case,) caused the book to be brought into the senate house of Seleucia, and a portion of it read aloud, for the purpose of insulting the Romans, who, even during war, he said, could not abstain from the perusal of such infamous compositions, c. 32. The immoral character of these tales, therefore, may be considered pretty clearly established; they were the Decameron and Heptameron of antiquity: but I regret their loss for all that.— ED. Think of the sublimity, I should rather say the profundity, of that passage in Ezekiel *, "Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest." I know nothing like it. May 11. 1830. SIR T. MONRO.. SIR S. RAFFLES.- SIR THOMAS MONRO and Sir Stamford Raffles were both great men; but I recognize more genius in the latter, though, I believe, the world says otherwise. I never found what I call an idea in any speech or writing of's. Those enormously prolix harangues are a proof of weakness int the higher intellectual grasp. Canning had a sense of the beautiful and the good; rarely speaks but to abuse, detract, and de * Chap. xxxvii. v. 3. grade. I confine myself to institutions, of course, and do not mean personal detraction, In my judgment, no man can rightly apprehend an abuse till he has first mastered the idea of the use of an institution. How fine, for example, is the idea of the unhired magistracy of England, taking in and linking together the duke to the country gentleman in the primary distribution of justice, or in the preservation of order and execution of law at least throughout the country! Yet never seems to have thought of it for one moment, but as connected with brewers, and barristers, and tyrannical Squire Westerns! From what I saw of Horner, I thought him a superior man, in real intellectual greatness. Canning flashed such a light around the constitution, that it was difficult to see the ruins of the fabric through it. |