FOSTERIANA:

THOUGHTS, REFLECTIONS, AND CRITICISMS,

SELECTED FROM

REVIEWS NOT PUBLISHED IN THE "CRITICAL ESSAYS."

FALSE MODEL OF AN INDEPENDENT MAN.*

By Independent Man, the author simply means, a man born to the inheritance of sufficient property to be the entire master of his plan of life; and the work professes to delineate a course of education and study for such a man, from his earliest infancy to an advanced period of maturity.

It may be proper to state generally, in a very few words, the kind of character which it is proposed that this man shall acquire, and the practical career through which it is presumed that he will be led. His virtue is to be of the true Roman quality, adopted for its dignity rather than sanctity, and therefore sustained by pride rather than conscience. After becoming an accomplished scholar, he is to liberalize and enlarge his views by travelling in foreign countries. By the time that he returns, he will be qualified to distinguish himself; and the ambition of doing this is to be a leading principle of his life, cherished by his instructors during his childhood, and afterwards cultivated and stimulated by himself.

There is not one sentence in the book that intimates an acknowledgment of a future life; and there are unequivocal marks of a total rejection of that revelation which has opened the prospect. The writer even rarely makes a serious reference

The Independent Man; or, an Essay on the Formation and Development of those Principles and Faculties of the Human Mind which constitute Moral and Intellectual Excellence. By George Ensor, Esq. Two vols. 8vo. 1806.

B

to a Divine Being; and it is in the language of contempt that he expresses, here and there, a transient allusion to religion, which he usually designates by the term superstition, especially when it is to Christianity that he alludes. This malignity is not always bold and explicit; for, as he says, "the authorized superstition of nations is only to be circumvented by distant approaches and desultory attacks; " meaning, undoubtedly, that the assailants must take care of their own impunity. It is hardly worth while to remind such a writer, of what has been repeated to his class a thousand times, that it was not in this sorry mode that the men, whose names he hates, assaulted the authorized superstitions of the pagan nations. If it had, the worship of Jupiter, Bacchus, and Venus, might, for them, have flourished long enough in all its glory. They sounded the trumpet, and advanced firmly in the face of their enemy, at the peril of incomparably greater evils than Mr. Ensor and his friends would, in these times, have to fear from any human power, in the most formal attack on what they account superstition. The hostility of those heroic innovators did not thus show itself for a moment, wriggling and hissing, and then slink back into a ditch. Our author and his class will reply, with the accustomed sneer, that they have no very eager desire for sufferings, though the Christians might and assuredly, considering the nature of their dissent, they are perfectly wise in not risking their safety for their opinions. But then they ought to have the decency to be totally silent about magnanimity, generous devotion to truth, the vindication of the claims of reason, and such nonsense (worse than nonsense in the mouths of these sneaking cowards); and yet this is a kind of dialect for which they affect a particular fondness. Few of them, however, speak out more intelligibly than our author; and when he does not choose to be precise, he resorts to the expedient, so common in his school, of intimating that the "dogmas of religion" are not only undeserving of the belief, but below the attention, of any one pretending to reason or philosophy. "It is not for me," this writer says, "to investigate such matters."

:

We have dwelt so particularly on this part of the character of the book, because we deem the preclusion and contempt of the sublime expectations founded on religion, to

FALSE MODEL OF AN INDEPENDENT MAN.

3

be absolutely fatal in a work professing to be a comprehensive scheme of intellectual and moral institution. For the final object of that institution, and consequently many of its principles and rules, must in a scheme which disowns those expectations, be fixed according to a standard infinitely too mean for the interests of man, if there may be the smallest chance that he may be immortal. If, on the contrary, it is certain there is a full end of him at death, then a discipline so strenuous as that here proposed, is perfectly ridiculous, by the contrast between the greatness of its labours, and the poorness and vanity of its object. According to this scheme, a man must force himself to an exertion as severe and unintermitted as ever a slave expired under,and for what? Why, to make, during a few years, a little figure and noise in the world, dividing the attention of the public with a Vestris, a Betty, or a Catalani, and enjoying incomparably the smaller share; or to obtain, just in order to lose, a partnership in office and power, with persons who, he might know, will endure none of his Catonic notions; or to make one more hapless trial to verify that weakest, wildest dream of philosophical fanaticism, that the complacency of virtue, without looking beyond itself, creates a happiness independent of all external circumstances; or to earn a little posthumous fame, which will be the same thing to him as the winds that will whistle over his tomb. The writer who can gravely propose a scheme so humble in its ends, and so onerous in its means, has neither, on the one hand, the sobriety of views requisite for adjusting a plan of discipline for beings who are to exist only a few years, and whose true policy is to incur as little uneasiness, and seize as much pleasure, as they can; nor, on the other hand, the enlargement of views indispensable in framing a system of education for beings who are to live for ever. He may give very good instructions relative to some of the specific parts and details; he may be a judicious guide in respect of a language or a science, and may even offer useful suggestions relating to morals; but believing, as we do, that the subject of his discipline is immortal, we cannot deem him better qualified to frame a system for the education and subsequent life of the Independent Man, whom he has taken under his management, than a bargeman on the river is

competent to command a ship which is to circumnavigate the globe, or than a vestry legislator is qualified to investigate the interests of an empire, or a parish officer to govern it.

It is impossible to imagine a book written, for the greater part, under a more complete exemption from all laws of regular connexion and consecutive train. The work is a huge mass of separate particles, brought into vicinity and contact, but not into combination. They are in the same situation as the atoms of the author's favourite Lucretius, at that particular period, when, after having danced about in the great vacuum in a state of infinite dispersion and freedom from all eternity, they at last, some million or two of ages before the complete formation of the world, found themselves, to the astonishment of each, all congregated thick together, waiting, as it came out afterwards, to be organized into a system. The work contains but little of what bears any semblance to reasoning, and scarcely anything that can be called disquisition. This is compensated, however, by an extraordinary measure of dogmatism, which is emitted in an oracular tone, and in shorter sentences than we can recollect to have been in use with any other of the pagan oracles. The author has a right to sneer, as he sometimes does, at "the believers ;" for he, on every subject he touches, is far beyond mere belief; he always knows.

A more imperfect scheme of morals was perhaps never exhibited in a work designed, and sufficiently amplified, to comprehend the outlines of whatever is indispensable to the formation of a character of exalted excellence. It totally omits or rejects some of the highest virtues according to the Christian scheme: this is a matter of course; but it also places the virtues which it does enjoin on a treacherous basis, and under the feeblest sanctions. The presence of the all-seeing Governor and Judge of the world, and the infinite importance of His approbation, were considerations too mean, vulgar, or fanatical, to be recollected by our philosopher, among the motives to virtue. And as to the disapprobation of that power, he expressly and vehemently protests against the inculcation of any such barbarous idea on the youthful mind.

The observations on morals are followed by three short and very miscellaneous sections, under the titles - genius

FALSE MODEL OF AN INDEPENDENT MAN.

5

and study requisite to great undertakings; objections to learning answered; remarks on reading. These contain sensible observations and learned allusions, but nothing particularly new; and the composition is so disconnected, that we are reminded of the description mentioned by Mr. Ensor as having been applied to the composition of Seneca, "sand without lime." Here, and in several places, he inculcates the favourite principle of Rousseau, that the value of individuals is in their being component parts of the community. A man's own happiness is to be made a secondary thing, as it should seem, to the welfare and glory of his friends and his country.

The language of the work is neither vulgar nor classical. Occasionally, it is really forcible; but very often it is unsuccessfully attempted to be made so, by short, snapped kind of sentences, which continually remind us of the crackers bouncing about the streets, with so much friskiness and petty explosion, on the evening of the fifth of November. There is often an incorrectness of construction, a quaintness of phrase, a crudeness in the enunciation of the thought, which we wonder so much familiarity with so many classical authors should not have prevented or reformed. The figurative illustrations now and then appear to have been brought into their places by main force, but in other instances are natural, expressive, and happy.

The most obvious feature of the composition, is a surprising frequency of proper names. A considerable number of this privileged order, this aristocratic class of words, has an enlivening effect, and helps to catch the attention of a person that may happen carelessly to open the book. But here they are crowded on the page, as plentifully as tin spangles on the robe of a strolling actress.