The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain Part 2

In England it is possible to trace the operation of this transforming power, which I have compared to the transforming power of tragedy, in a very complete manner. It reveals itself, for instance, in two different modes or aspects, which, for the sake of clearness, may be dealt with separately. In the first of these aspects, deeply and permanently affecting the national consciousness, which as we have seen is distinct from the sum of the units composing it, the law of tragedy appears as the influence of suffering, of "terror" in the mystic transcendental sense of the word, of reverent fear, yet with it, serene and dauntless courage. This influence now makes itself felt in English politics, in English religion, in English civic life.

If we consider the history of England prior to this epoch, it might at first sight appear as if here were a race emphatically not destined for empire. Not in her dealings with conquered France, not in Ireland, not in Scotland, does England betray, in her national consciousness, any sympathy even with that aspiration towards concrete justice which marks the imperial character of Persia and of Rome. England seems fated to add but one record more to the tedious story of unintelligent tyrant States, ill.u.s.trating the theme--+hubris phyteuei tyrannon+--"insolence begets the tyrant!" Even to her contemporary, Venice, the mind turns from England with relief; whilst in the government of Khora.s.san by the earlier Abba.s.sides we encounter an administration singularly free from the defects that vitiate Imperial Rome at its zenith. And now in the days of the first Tudors all England's efforts at empire have come to nothing. Knut's empire sinks with him; Norman and Plantagenet follow; but of their imperial policy the dying words of Mary Tudor, "Calais will be found graven on my heart," form the epitaph. It was not merely the loss of Calais that oppressed the dying Queen, but she felt instinctively, obscurely, prophetically that here was an end to the empire which her house had inherited from Norman and Plantagenet.

But in the national consciousness, the consciousness of the State, a change is now apparent. As Athens rose from Syracuse, a new Athens, as Rome rose from Cannae, a new city, to conquer by being conquered, so from the lost dreams of empire over France, over Scotland, England arises a new nation. This declares itself in the altered course of her policy alike in France, Ireland, and Scotland. In Ireland, for instance, an incomplete yet serious and high-purposed effort is made to bring, if not justice, at least law to the hapless populations beyond the Pale. Henry VIII again, like Edward I, is a masterful king. In politics, in constructive genius, he even surpa.s.ses Edward I. He abandons the folly of an empire in France, and though against Scotland he achieves a triumph signal as that of Edward, he has no thought of reverting to the Plantagenet policy. He defeats the Scots at Flodden; but he has the power of seeing that in spite of his victory they are not defeated at all. King James IV lies dead there, with all his earls around him, like a Berserker warrior, his chiefs slain around him, "companions," _comites_ indeed, in that t.i.tle's original meaning. But the spirit of the nation is quickened, not broken, and Henry VIII, recognising this, steadily pursues the policy which leads to 1603, when these two peoples, by a mutual renunciation, both schooled in misery, and with the Hebrew phrase, "Well versed in suffering, and in sorrow deeply skilled," working so to speak in their very blood, are united.

The Puritan wars, and the struggle for an ideal higher than that of nationality, cement the union.

In the development of the life of a State, the distance in time between causes and their visible effects often makes the sequence obscure or sink from sight altogether. As in geology the century is useless as a unit to measure the periods with which that science deals, and as in astronomy the mile is useless as a standard for the interstellar s.p.a.ces; so in history, in tracing the organic changes within the conscious life of a State, the l.u.s.trum, the dekaetis, or even the generation, would sometimes be a less misleading unit than the year.

The England of Elizabeth drew the first outline of the Empire of the future; but five generations were to pa.s.s before the Britain of Chatham[7] could apply itself with a single-hearted resolution to fill that outline in, and yet three other generations before this people as a whole was to become completely conscious of its high destiny.

Freedom of religion and const.i.tutional liberty had to be placed beyond the peril of encroachment or overthrow, before the imperial enterprise could be unreservedly pursued; but the deferment of the task has nerved rather than weakened the energy of her resolve. Had England fallen in the Maryborough wars, she would have left a name hardly more memorable than that of Venice or Carthage, ill.u.s.trious indeed, but without a claim to original or creative Imperialism. But if she were to perish now, it would be in the pursuance of a design which has no example in the recorded annals of man.

Similarly in Rome, two centuries sever the Rome which rose from Cannae from the Rome which administered Egypt and Hispania. And in Islam four generations languish in misery before the true policy of the Abba.s.sides displays itself, striking into the path which it never abandoned.

In England then the influence of this epoch of tragic insight, and of its transforming force, advances imperceptibly, unnoted across two generations, yet the true sequence of cause and effect is unquestionable. The England which, towards the close of the eighteenth century, presents itself like a fate amongst the peoples of India, bears within itself the wisdom which in the long run will save it from the errors, and turn it from the path, which the England of the Plantagenets followed in Ireland and in France. The national consciousness of England, stirred to its depths by its own suffering, its own defeats, its own humiliations, comes there in India within the influence of that which in the life of a State, however little it may affect the individual life as such, is the deepest of all suffering.

England stands then in the presence of a race whose life is in the memories of its past; its literature, its arts, its empires that rise and dissolve like dreams; its religions, its faiths, with all their strange a.n.a.logies, dim suggestions, mysterious as a sea cavern full of sounds. Hard upon this experience in India comes that of the farther East, comes that of Egypt, that of Africa in the nineteenth century.

How can such a fortune fail to change the heart, the consciousness of a race, imparting to it forces from these wider horizons, deepening its own life by the contact with this manifold environment? He who might have been a de Montfort, a Grenville, or a Raleigh, is now by these presences uplifted to other ideals, and by these varied and complex influences of suffering, and the presence of suffering, raised from the sphere of concrete freedom and concrete justice to the higher realm ruled by imaginative freedom, imaginative justice, which Sophocles, in the choral ode of the _Oedipus_, delineates, "the laws of sublimer range, whose home is the pure ether, whose origin is G.o.d alone."

-- 3. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT

The second mode or aspect in which the Law of Tragedy as applied to history reveals itself in the life of a State, corresponds to the moment of intenser vision in the individual life, when the soul, exalted by "compa.s.sion and terror," discerns the deeper truth, the serener ideal which henceforth it pursues as if impelled by the fixed law of its being. There is a word coined by Aristotle which comes down the ages to us, bringing with it as it were the sound of the griding of the Spartan swords as they leapt from their scabbards on the morning of Thermopylae, the +energeia tes psyches+--the energy of the soul. This energy of the soul in Aristotle is the _vertu_ of Machiavelli, the spring of political wisdom, the foundation of the greatness of a State.

It is the immortal energy which arises within the consciousness of a nation, or in the soul of an individual, as the result of that hour of insight, of pity, of anguish, or contrition. It is the heroism which adverse fortune greatens, which antagonism but excites to yet sublimer daring.

In Rome this displays itself, both in policy and in war, in the centuries that immediately succeed Cannae. Nothing in history is more worthy of attention than the impression which Rome in this epoch of her history made upon the minds of men, above all, upon the mind of h.e.l.las.

Its expression in Polybius is remarkable.

Polybius, if not one of the greatest of thinkers on politics, has a place with the greatest political historians for all time. It was his work which Chatham placed in the hands of his son, the younger Pitt, as the supreme guide in political history. Polybius has every inducement to abhor Rome, to judge her actions with jealous and unfriendly eyes.

His father was the companion of Philopoemen, the heroic leader of the Achaean league, sometimes styled "the last of the Greeks," the Kosciusko of the old world. Polybius himself is a hostage in Rome, the representative of a defeated race, a lost cause; and yet after years of study of his conquerors, possessing every means for a just estimate of their actions and motives in the senate, on the battlefield, in the intimacies of private life, the conviction of his heart becomes that there in Rome is a people divinely appointed to the government, not of h.e.l.las merely, but of the whole earth. The message of his history, composed with scrupulous care, and a critical method rare in that age, is that the very stars in their courses fight for Rome, whether she wages war against Greek or against Barbarian, that hers is the domination of the earth, the empire of the world, and it is to the eternal honour of Greece that it accepted this message. The Romano-h.e.l.lenic empire is born. Other men arise both to the east and to the west of the Adriatic, in whom the Greek and Roman genius are fused, who pursue the ideal and amplify or adorn the thought which Polybius was the first to express immortally. It inspires the rhetoric of Cicero; and falls with a kind of glory on the verse of Virgil--

Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera, credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus, orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent: tu regere imperio populos Romane memento; hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem, parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.

The tutor of Hadrian makes it the informing idea of his parallel "Lives," and gives form and feature to a grandeur that else were incredible. It appears in the duller work of the industrious Dion Ca.s.sius, and in the fourth century forges some of the n.o.blest verse of Claudian. And as we have seen, it is enshrined nine centuries after Claudian in the splendid eloquence of the _De Monarchia_, and yields such spent, such senile life as they possess, to the empires of Hapsburg and Bourbon. Thus this divine energy, which after Cannae uplifts Rome, riveting the sympathies of Polybius, outlives Rome itself, still controlling the imaginations of men, until its last flicker in the eighteenth century.

Where in the history of England, in the life of England as a State, does this energy, exalted by the hour of tragic vision, manifest itself? Recollect our problem; it is by a.n.a.lysis, comparison, and contrast, to discover what is the testimony of the past to Britain's t.i.tle-deeds of empire.

Great races, like great individuals, resemble the giants in the old myth, the _gigantes_, the earth-born, sons of Gaia, who, thrown in the wrestle, touched her bosom, and rose stronger than before defeat.

England stood this test in the sixteenth century, rising from that long humiliating war with France, that not less humiliating war with Scotland, greater than before her defeat. This energy of the soul, quickened by tragic insight, displays itself not merely in the Armada struggle but before that struggle, under various forms in pre-Armada England.

The spirit of the sea-wolves of early times, of the sailors who in the fourteenth century fought at Sluys, and made the Levant an English lake, lives again in the Tudor mariners. But it has been transformed, and sets towards other and greater endeavours, planning a mightier enterprise. These adventurers make it plain that on the high seas is the path of England's peace; that the old policy of the Plantagenet kings, with all its heroism and indisputable greatness, had been a false policy; that England's empire was not to be sought on the plains of France; that Gilbert, Drake, Raleigh, and Frobisher have found the way to the empire which the Plantagenets blindly groped after.

As Camoens in Portugal invents a n.o.ble utterance for the genius of his nation, for the times of Vasco da Gama and of Emmanuel the Great, so this spirit of pre-Armada England, of England which as yet has but the memory of battles gained and lost wars, finds triumphant expression in Marlowe and his elder contemporaries. Marlowe's[8] great dialect seems to fall naturally from the lips of the heroes of Hakluyt's _Voyages_, that work which still impresses the imagination like the fragments of some rude but mighty epic, and in their company the exaggeration, the emphasis of _Tamburlaine_ are hardly perceptible. In Martin Frobisher, for instance, how the purpose which determines his career illumines for us the England of the first years of Elizabeth! Frobisher in early manhood torments his heart with the resentful reflection, "What a blockish thing it has been on the part of England to permit the Genovese Columbus to discover America!" That task was clearly England's! "And now there being nothing great left to be done," the sole work Frobisher finds worth attempting is the discovery of the northwest pa.s.sage to Cathay. Upon this he spends the pith of his manhood year by year, and the result of all the labours of this sea-Hercules, well! it is perhaps to be sought in those dim beings, "half-man, half-fish," whom he brings back from some voyage, those forlorn Esquimaux who, seen in London streets, and long remembered, suggested to the dreaming soul of Shakespeare Caliban and his island.

Frobisher's watchword on the high seas is memorable. In the northern lat.i.tudes, under the spectral stars, the sentinel of the _Michael_ gives the challenge "For G.o.d the Lord," and sentinel replies, "And Christ His Sonne."

The repulse of Spain is but the culminating achievement of this energy of the soul which greatens the life of England already in pre-Armada times. And simultaneously with the conflict against Spain this same energy attests its presence in a form a.s.suredly not less divine within the souls of those who rear that unseen empire, whose foundations are laid eternally in the thoughts of men, the empire reared by Shakespeare, Webster, Beaumont, and Milton.

In the seventeenth century it inspires the statesmen of England not only with the ardour for const.i.tutional freedom, but engages them in ceaseless and not unavailing efforts towards a deeper conception of justice and of liberty, foreshadowing unconsciously the ideals of later times. If the Thirty Years' War did nothing else for England it implanted in her great statesmen a profound distrust of the imperial systems of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs. Eliot, for instance, in the work ent.i.tled _The Monarchy of Man_, lofty in its form as in its thought, written in his prison, though studying Plato and the older ideals of empire, is yet obscurely searching after a new ideal. We encounter a similar effort in the great Montrose, capable of that Scottish campaign, and of writing one of the finest love-songs in the language, capable also of some very vivid thoughts on statesmans.h.i.+p.

In natures like Eliot and Montrose, the height of the ideal determines the steadfastness of the action. And that ideal, I repeat, is distinct from Plato's, distinct from Dante's, and from that of the Bourbon and Hapsburg empires, in which Dante's conception is but rudely or imperfectly developed. The ideal of these English statesmen is framed upon another conception of justice, another conception of freedom, equally sublime, and more catholic and humane. Whatever its immediate influence upon certain of their contemporaries, over their own hearts it was all-powerful. The very vividness with which they conceive the ideal, and the n.o.ble constancy with which they pursue it, link the high purposes of these two men to the purposes of Milton, of Cromwell, of Selden, and of Falkland. The perfect State, the scope of its laws, government, religion, to each is manifest, though the path that leads thither may seem now through Monarchy, now through a Republic, or at other times indistinct, or lost altogether in the bewildering maze of adverse interests. From the remote nature of their quest arises much of the apparent inconsistency in the political life of that era. The parting of Pym and Strafford acquires an added, a tragic poignancy from the consciousness in the heart of each that the star which leads him on is the star of England's destiny.

Hence, too, the suspicion attached to men like Selden and Falkland of being mere theoricians in advance of their time,--an accusation fatal to statesmans.h.i.+p. But the advent of that age was marked by so much that was novel in religion,[9] in State, in foreign and domestic policy, the new direction of imperial enterprise, the unity of two nations, ancient and apparently irreconcilable foes, the jarring creeds, convulsing the life of both these nations, for both were deeply religious, that it were rash to accuse of rashness any actor in those times. But it is the adventurous daring of their spirits, the swift glance searching the horizons of the future, it is that very energy of the soul of which I have spoken which render these statesmen obnoxious to the suspicion of theory. The temper of Selden, indeed, in harmony with the thoughtful and melancholy cast of his features, disposed him to subtlety and niceness of argument, and with a division pending, often deprived his words of a force which homelier orators could command. And yet his career is a presage of the future. Toleration in religion, freedom of the press, the supremacy of the seas, the _habeas corpus_, are all lines along which his thought moves, not so much distancing as leading the practical statesmen of his generation. And there is a curious fitness in the dedication to him in 1649 of Edward Poc.o.c.ke's Arabic studies, which nearly a century and a half later were to form the basis of Gibbon's great chapters. But the year of _Mare Clausum_ is at once the greatest in Selden's life, and the last months of greatness in the life of his royal master.[10]

But theory is a charge which has ever been urged against revolutionists. Revolution is the child of speculation. The men of the seventeenth century are discoverers in politics. Their mark is a wider empire than that of Vasco da Gama and his king, a realm more wondrous than that of Aeetes. But Da Gama did not steer forthright to the Indies, nor Jason to the Colchian strand, though each knew clearly the goal he sought, just as Wentworth and Selden, Falkland and Montrose, Eliot and Milton, knew the State they were steering for, though each may have wavered in his own mind as to the course, and at last parted fatally from his companions. Practical does not always mean commonplace, and in the light of their deeds it seems superfluous to discuss whether the writer of _Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_, the destroyer of the Campbells, or the accuser of Buckingham, were practical politicians. In their lives, in the shaping of their careers, the visionary is actualized, the ideal real, in that fidelity of soul which leaves one dead on the battlefield, another on the gibbet, thirty feet high, "honoured thus in death," as he remarked pleasantly, a third to the dreary martyrdom of the Tower, a fourth to that dread visitation, endured with stoic grandeur, and yet at times forcing from his lips the cry of anguish which thrills the verse of _Samson Agonistes_--

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse, Without all hope of day.

But not in vain. The tireless centuries have accomplished the task these men initiated, have travelled the path they set forth in, have completed the journey which they began.

We find the same pre-occupation with some wider conception of justice, empire, and freedom in the younger Barclay, the author of _Argenis_, written in Latin but read in many languages, studied by Richelieu and moulding his later, wiser policy towards the Huguenots, read, above all, by Fenelon, who rises from it to write _Telemaque_. It meets us in the last work of Algernon Sidney, which, like Eliot's treatise, bears about it the air of a martyr's cell. We find it again explicitly in the _Oceana_ of Harrington, in the fragmentary writings of Shaftesbury, and in actual politics it finds triumphant expression at last in the eloquence that was like a battle-cry, in the energy that at moments seems superhuman, the wisdom, the penetrating foresight, of the mightiest of all England's statesmen-orators, the elder Pitt. It burns in clear flame in the men who come after him, in his own son, only less great than his great sire; in Charles James Fox and in Windham, who in the great debate[11] of 1801 fought obstinately to save the Cape when Nelson and St. Vincent would have flung it away; in Canning, Wilberforce, in Romilly; in poets like Sh.e.l.ley, and thinkers like John Stuart Mill.

The revolution in parliamentary representation during the present century, a revolution which, extending over more than fifty years, from 1831 to 1884, may even be compared in its momentous consequences with the revolution of 1640-88, though const.i.tutional in design, yet forms an integral part of the wider movement whose course across the centuries we have indicated. The leaders in this revolution, men like Russell and Grey, complete the work which Eliot, Wentworth, and Pym began. They ask the question, else unasked, they answer the question, else unanswered--How shall a people, not itself free, a people disqualified and disfranchised, become the harbinger of a new era to other peoples, or the herald of the higher freedom to the ancient races of India--Aryans, of like blood with our own, moving forever as in a twilight air, woven of the pride, the pathos, all the sombre yet undecaying memories of their fabulous past--to the Moslem populations whose "Book" proclaimed the political equality of men twelve centuries before Mirabeau spoke or the Bastille fell?

This, then, is the testimony of the Past, and the witness of the Dead is this. Thus it has arisen, this ideal, the ideal of Britain as distinct from the ideal of Rome, of Islam, or of Persia--thus it has arisen, this Empire, unexampled in present and without a precedent in former times; for Athens under Pericles was but a masked despotism, and the republic-empire of Islam pa.s.sed swifter than a dream. Thus it has arisen, this Imperial Britain, from the dark Unconscious emerging to the Conscious, not like an empire of mist uprising under the wands of magic-working architects, but based on heroisms, endurances, lofty ideals frustrate yet imperishable, patient thought slowly elaborating itself through the ages--the sea-wolves' battle fury, the splendour of chivalry, the crusader's dazzling hope, the immortal ardour of Norman and Plantagenet kings, baffled, foiled, but still in other forms returning to uplift the spirit of succeeding times, the unconquered hearts of Tudor mariners rejoicing in the battle onset and the storm, the strung thought, the intense vision of statesmen of the later centuries, Eliot, Chatham, Canning, and at the last, deep-toned, far-echoing as the murmur of forests and cataracts, the sanctioning voices of enfranchised millions accepting their destiny, resolute!

This is the achievement of the ages, this the greatest birth of Time.

For in the empires of the past there is not an ideal, not a structural design which these warriors, monarchs, statesmen have not, deliberately or unconsciously, rejected, or, as in an alembic, trans.m.u.ted to finer purposes and to n.o.bler ends.

[1] Goethe a.s.serts that Spinozism trans.m.u.ted into a creed by a.n.a.lytic reflection is simply Machiavelism.

[2] The twenty-two books of Sulla's Memoirs, _rerum suarum gestarum commentarii_, were dedicated to his friend Lucullus; they were still in existence in the time of Tacitus and Plutarch, though the fragments which now remain serve but to mock us with regret for the loss. Of Sulla's verses--like many cultured Romans of that age, the conqueror of Caius Marius amused his leisure with writing Greek epigrams--exactly so much has survived as of the troubadour songs of Richard I of England, or of Frederick II of Jerusalem and Sicily. Sulla's remark on the young Caesar is for the youth of Caius Julius as illuminating as Richelieu's on Conde or as Pasquale Paoli's on Bonaparte.

[3] Aristotle refers only to the effect on the spectators; but the continued existence of the State makes it at once actor and spectator in the tragedy. The transforming power is thus more intimate and profound.

[4] "G.o.d in His mercy such created me "That misery of yours attains me not, "Nor any flame a.s.sails me of this burning."

[5] In ill.u.s.tration of this position a contrast might be drawn between the policy of Athens in Melos, as set forth by Thucydides in the singular dialogue of the fifth book, and the part a.s.signed to Justice by a writer equally impersonal, grave, and unimpa.s.sioned--the author of the _Politics_--in the recurrence throughout that work of such phrases as "The State which is founded on Justice alone can stand." "Man when perfected (+teleothen+) is the n.o.blest thing that lives, but separated from justice (+choristhen nomou ka dikes+) the basest of all."

"Virtue cannot be the ruin of those who possess it, nor Justice the destruction of a City." The tragedies of Sophocles that are of a later date than 413 B.C. betray an att.i.tude towards political life distinct from that which characterizes his earlier works. The shading-in of the life of the State into that of the individual defies a.n.a.lysis, and it were hazardous to affirm what traits of thought ought to be referred to the genius of the State as distinct from the individual; but it appears as difficult to imagine _before_ Syracuse, the vehement insistence upon Justice, the impa.s.sioned idealization which characterize Plato, Socrates, and Demosthenes, as it is difficult _after_ Syracuse to imagine the political temper of a Pericles or an Anaxagoras.

[6] The Greek orators and philosophers of the fourth century B.C. had before them a problem not without resemblances to that which confronted the Hebrew prophets of Judaea in the seventh. Even their most speculative writings had a practical end, a goal which they considered attainable by h.e.l.las, or by Athens. The disappearance of Socrates from the _Laws_, the increased seriousness of the treatment of Sparta and of Crete, the original and paragon of Lacedaemon, may indicate a concession to the prejudices of a generation which had grown up since Aegospotami, and a last effort by Plato to bring his teaching home to the common life of Athens and of h.e.l.las. So in the England of the seventeenth century the political writings of Bacon and Hobbes, of Milton and Harrington, though speculative in form, are most practical in their aims. Hobbes' first literary effort indeed, his version of Thucydides, is planned as a warning to England against civil discord and its ills. This was in 1628--fatal date!

[7] The elder Pitt may be regarded as the first great minister of the English _people_ as distinguished from men like Thomas Cromwell, Stratford, or Clarendon, who strictly were ministers of the king. "It rains gold-boxes," Horace Walpole writes when, in April, 1757. Pitt was dismissed, and it was these tokens of his popularity with the merchants of England, not the recognition of his genius by the king, which led to his return to office in June. The events of the period of four years and ten months during which this man was dictator of the House of Commons and of England are so graven on all hearts that a mere enumeration in order of time suffices to recall moving incidents, characters, and scenes of epic grandeur:--December 17th, 1756, Pitt-Devons.h.i.+re ministry formed, Highland regiments raised, national militia organized. 1757, CLIVE'S victory at Pla.s.sey, June 23rd, and conquest of Bengal. 1758, June 3rd, destruction of forts at Cherbourg, three s.h.i.+ps of war, 150 privateers burned to the sea-line; November 25th, Fort Duquesne captured; December 29th, conquest of Goree. 1759, "year of victories"; February 16th, POc.o.c.k relieves Madras; May 1st, capture of Guadaloupe; July 4th, R. RODNEY at Havre destroys the flat-bottomed Armada; July 31st, WOLFE'S repulse at Beaufort; August 19th, BOSCAWEN destroys French fleet in Lagos Bay; September 2nd, POc.o.c.k defeats D'Ache; September 9th, WOLFE'S last letter to Pitt; September 13th, 10 a.m., Plains of Abraham and conquest of Canada; November 20th, HAWKE defeats Conflans in Quiberon Bay, "Lay me alongside the French Admiral." 1760, January 22nd, EYRE-COOTE defeats Lally at Wandewash, conquest of Carnatic. 1761, January 16th, English enter Pondicherry; Bellisle citadel reduced, "Quebec over again," June 7th; October 5th, PITT resigns. It is doubtful whether, since the eleventh century and Hildebrand and William the Conqueror, the European stage has been occupied simultaneously by two such men as Chatham and the king of Prussia.

[8] The same delight in power, the same glory in dominion, pulsate in the Lusiads and in the dramas of Marlowe, but Marlowe was by far the wider in his intellectual range. Worlds were open to his glance beyond the Indies and Cathay that were shut to Camoens. Yet Camoens is a heroic figure. He found it easy to delineate Vasco da Gama; he had but to speak with his own voice, and utter simply his own heart's desires, hates, musings, and Vasco da Gama's sister would have turned to listen, thinking she heard the accents, the trick, the very manner that betrayed the hero.

[9] Burnet is incredibly vain, unredeemed by Boswell's hero-wors.h.i.+p; yet his book reflects the medley, the fervour, the vehemence, crimes, hopes of this time. In one sentence nineteen religions are named as co-existing in Scotland.

[10] The _Mare Clausum_ was framed as an answer to Grotius' _Mare Liberum_, which had been printed, perhaps without Grotius' consent, in 1610. Selden's tract, printed in November, 1635, is a folio of 304 pages, in which, setting forth precedent on precedent, he claims for England, as by law and ancient custom established, that same supremacy over the high seas as the Portuguese had exercised over the eastern waters, and Venice over the Adriatic. The King's enthusiasm was kindled. The work was issued with all the circ.u.mstance of a State paper, and it came upon foreign courts like a declaration of policy, the resolve at length to enforce the time-honoured and indefeasible rights of England. Copies were with due ceremony deposited in the Exchequer and at the Admiralty. A fleet was equipped, and as an atonement for the wrongs done to the elder Northumberland, the King gave the command to his son, whose portrait as Admiral forms one of the n.o.blest of Vandyck's canvases. But Northumberland, though brave to a fault, was no seaman, and the whole enterprise threatened to end in ridicule. Stung to the quick, Charles again turned to the nation. But in the nine intervening years since 1628 the nation's heart had left him. To his demand for supplies to strengthen the fleet came Hampden's refusal. The trial was the prelude to the Grand Remonstrance, to Naseby, and to Whitehall, where, as if swept thither by the crowded events of some fantastic dream, he awoke from his visions of England's greatness and the empire of the seas, alone on a scaffold, surrounded by a ring of English eyes, looking hate, sullen indifference, or cold resolution.

Leave him still loftier than the world suspects, Living or dying.

After all he was a king, and in his veins the blood of Mary Stuart still beat. An English version of Selden's treatise appeared in the time of Cromwell. The translator was Marchamont Nedham. The dedication to the Supreme Authority of the Nation, the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England, is dated November 19th, 1652.

[11] The preliminaries to the Peace of Amiens were signed on October 1st, 1801. Parliament opened on October 29th, and after the King's speech, Windham compared his position amid the general rejoicings of the House at the prospect of an end to the war, to Hamlet's at the wedding-feast of Claudius. In the debate of November 3rd, Pitt declared himself resigned to the loss of the Cape by the retention of Ceylon, while the opinion of Fox was, that by this surrender we should have the benefit of the colony without its expenses. Nelson, with the glory of his victory at Copenhagen just six months old, maintained that in the days when Indiamen were heavy s.h.i.+ps the Cape had its uses, but now that they were coppered, and sailed well, the Cape was a mere tavern that served to delay the voyage. The opening of Windham's speech on the 4th, "We are a conquered nation, England gives all, France nothing," defines his position (_Parl. Hist._ x.x.xvi, pp. 1-191).

Windham was one of the few statesmen who, even before the consulate had pa.s.sed into the Empire, understood the gravity of our relations to France. Every month added proof of the accuracy of his presentiments, but once understood by England there was no faltering. Prussia, Austria, the Czar, all acknowledged the new Empire, and made peace or alliance with its despot, but from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens England waged a war without truce till Elba and Ste. Helene.