more. XIII. TO REV. H. JENKINS. Rugby, November 11, 1829. I thank you heartily for two very kind letters, and am very anxious to be favored with some more of your friend's comments [on Thucydides]. I hope I am not too old or too lazy or too obstinate to be taught better. . . . . . I do thank you very much for your kindness in taking so much trouble in my behalf; and I earnestly beg of you to send me And can you tell me, or, if not, will you ask Amicus Doct., where is to be found a summary of the opinions of English scholars about ones and onws μŋ, and the moods which they require: and further, do you or he hold their doctrine good for anything? Dawes, and all men who endeavor to establish general rules, are of great use in directing one's attention to points which one might otherwise have neglected; and labor and acuteness often discover a rule, where indolence and carelessness fancied it was all haphazard. But larger induction and sounder judgment (which I think exist in Hermann in an infinite degree beyond any of our English scholars) teach us to distinguish again between a principle and an usage; the latter may be general, but if it be merely usage, grounded on no intelligible principle, it seems to me foolish to insist on its being universal, and to alter texts right and left, to make them all conformable to the Canon. Equidem, both in Greek and in other matters, -I think liberty a far better thing than uniformity of form merely, where no principle is concerned. Voilà the cloven foot. XIV. TO J. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ. (In allusion to a libel in the John Bull.) Rugby, May 11, 1830. I thank you for another very kind letter. In a matter of this sort, I willingly resign my own opinion to that of a man like yourself, at once my friend and legal adviser. I think, too, that I am almost bound to attend to the opinion of the Bishop of London; for his judgment of the inexpediency of prosecuting must rest on the scandal which he thinks it will bring upon religion and the Church, and of this he is a far better judge than I am; nor, to say the truth, should I much like to act in a doubtful matter in opposition to the decided advice of a Bishop in a case that concerned the Church. I say this in sober earnest, in spite of what you call my Whiggery and Radicalism. XV. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS. Rugby, May 12, 1830. The authorities which are arrayed against proceeding are quite decisive, and I heartily agree with you that clergymen must not go to law, when lawyers say they should not. Still, as I had no thought of gain or of vengeance, but simply of procuring a public justification of my characternot my opinions-I feel that it would have been no lack of charity to proceed, though I am heartily glad to be spared the necessity of doing so by so many and such powerful representations. But I trust that you and all my friends will give me credit for being perfectly tolerant of all attacks upon my writings or general abuse of my opinions. Believe me, I ters. am heartily glad of the final result of this discussion, for I had no wish to go to law; but I thought that my known, or rather my misrepresented opinions on politics, ought to make me particularly anxious to deny any charge respecting religious matBut I am perfectly willing to take the judgment of my friends and of impartial persons in what rests wholly on opinion; and besides, if the attack or loss to my own character were ever so great, I should quite agree with you that it was better to bear it, than to bring sacred things into discussion in places and through disputants wholly unfitted for them. But this I at first did not contemplate as the likely result. XVI. TO F. HARTWELL, ESQ. Rugby, June 28, 1830. I have just published one volume of Thucydides; when the others will follow, it is hard to say, for the work here is more and more engrossing continually; but I like it better and better; it has all the interest of a great game of chess, with living creatures for pawns and pieces, and your adversary, in plain English, the Devil: truly he plays a very tough game, and is very hard to beat, if I ever do beat him. It is quite surprising to see the wickedness of young boys; or would be surprising, if I had not had my own school experience and a good deal since to enlighten me. XVII. TO THE REV. GEORGE CORNISH. Rugby, August 24, 1830. Your letter was a most welcome sight to me the first morning of my arrival at home, amidst the host of strange handwritings and letters of business which now greet me every morning. It rejoices me to think that we are going to have a cousin of yours at Rugby, and I suppose we shall see him here on Saturday, when the great coach starts. You know that it is licensed to carry not exceeding 260 passengers, besides the foundationers. I agreed with the Pythagoreans that τὸ ἀόριστον was one of the number of κάκα, and so I applied to the Trustees, and got the limit set. We are not near it yet, being not quite 260, including foundationers, and perhaps may never reach it; but that I shall not at all regret, and all I wanted was never to go beyond it. We have got a Cambridge man, a Fellow of Trinity, who was most highly recommended to me as a new master: and I hope we shall pull hard and all together during the next half-year; there is plenty to be done, I can assure you; but thank God, I continue to enjoy the work, and am now in excellent condition for setting to it. You may see M- -'s name and mine amongst the subscribers for the sufferers at Paris. It seems to me a most blessed revolution, spotless beyond all example in history, and the most glorious instance of a royal rebellion against society, promptly and energetically repressed, that the world has yet seen. It magnificently vindicates the cause of knowledge and liberty, showing how humanizing to all classes of society are the spread of thought and information, and improved political institutions; and it lays the crimes of the last revolution just in the right place, the wicked aristocracy, that had so brutalized the people by its long iniquities that they were like slaves broken loose when they first bestirred themselves. Before all these events took place, on my way out through France, I was reading Guizot's History of the Progress of Civilization in France from the earliest times. You know he is now Minister of the Interior, and one of the ablest writers in France. In his book he gives a history of the Pelagian controversy, a most marvellous contrast with the Liberals of a former day, or with our Westminster Reviewers now. Guizot sides with St. Augustine; but the whole chapter is most worthy of notice; the freedom of the will, so far as to leave a consciousness of guilt when we have not done our duty, the corruption of our nature, which never lets us in fact come up to what we know we ought to do, and the help derived from prayers to God, are stated as incontrovertible philosophical facts, of which every man's experience may convince him; and Guizot blames Pelagius for so exaggerating the notion of human freedom as to lose sight of our need of external assistance. And there is another chapter on the unity of the Church no less remarkable. Now Guizot is Professor of History in the University of Paris, and a most eminent Liberal; and it seems to me worthy of all notice to observe his language with regard to religion. And I saw Niebuhr at Bonn, on my way home, and talked with him for three hours; and I am satisfied from my own ears, if I had any doubts before, of the grossness of the slander which called him an unbeliever. I was every way delighted with him, and liked very much what I saw of his wife and children. Trevenen and his wife enjoyed the journey exceedingly, and are all the better for it. Amongst other things, I visited the Grand Chartreuse, which is certainly enough to make a man romantic, and the Church of Madonna del Monte; from whence, or rather from a mountain above it, I counted twelve mountain outlines between me and the horizon, -the last, the ridge of the highest Alps-upon a sky so glowing with the sunset, that instead of looking white from their snow, they were like the teeth of a saw upon a plate of red-hot iron, all deep and black. I was delighted also with Venice; most of all delighted to see the secret prisons of the old aristocracy converted into lumber-rooms, and to see German soldiers exercising authority in that place, which was once the very focus of the moral degradation of the Italian race, the seat of falsehood and ignorance and cruelty. They talk of building a bridge to Venice over the Lagune; if so, I am glad that I have seen it first. I like Padua also, more than I thought I could have liked the birthplace of Titus Livius. The influence of the clergy must be great there, and most beneficially exercised; for a large institution for the poor of Padua, providing for those who are out of work, as well as for the old VOL. I. 21 P and infirm, derives its main support from legacies; the clergy never failing to urge every man who can at all afford it to leave something at his death for this object. We came home through the Tyrol, and through Wurtemberg and Baden, countries apparently as peaceful and prosperous and simple mannered as I ever saw; it is quite economical travelling there. And now, when shall I travel to Kenwyn? I hope one of these days; but whether in the next winter or not is hard to say; I only know that there are few things which I should enjoy better. I was so sorry to miss old Tucker, who came here for one day when I was abroad; he was at Leamington with his sister to consult our great oracle, Jephson. Charles, I suppose, is only coming home upon leave, and will go out again; I should be very glad to see him, and to show him his marks on my Hederic's Lexicon when he was at Wyatt's. I wish I may be able to do anything for you as to a curate, but I am very much out of the world in those matters, and I have no regular correspondence with Oxford. I am afraid I am sadly in disgrace with all parties, between my Pamphlet and Sermons, and I am afraid that Thucydides will not mend the matter. As for the Pamphlet, that is all natural enough, but I really did not think there was any cloven foot in the Sermons, nor did I wish to show any; not, I hope, from timeserving, but because, what you said about the schism question, I wished to do with that and divers other points, — i. e. reserve them for a separate volume, which I hope I may be able to publish before I die. There are some points on which I feel almost as if I had a testimony to deliver, which I ought not to withhold. And Milman's History of the Jews made me more and more eager to deliver myself of my conceptions, But how to do it without interfering with other and even more pressing duties, I cannot tell. Last half-year, I preached every Sunday in Lent, and for the last five Sundays. of the half-year also, besides other times; and I had to write new sermons for all these, for I cannot bear to preach to the boys anything but what is quite fresh, and suggested by their particular condition. I never like preaching anywhere else so well; for one's boys are even more than a parish, inasmuch as one knows more of them all individually, than can easily be the case in a parish, and has a double authority over them, temporal as well as spiritual. Though, to speak seriously, it is quite awful to watch the strength of evil in such young minds, and how powerless is every effort against it. It |