service of France. The Scotch Highlanders will ere long disappear from the face of the earth; the mountains are daily depopulating; the great estates have ruined the land of the Gaul as they did ancient Italy. The Highlander will ere long exist only in the romances of Walter Scott. The tartan and the claymore excite surprise in the streets of Edinburgh; they disappear-they emigrate; their national airs will ere long be lost, as the music of the Eolian harp when the winds are hushed.

Behind the Celtic world, the old red granite of the European formation has arisen-a new world, with different passions, desires, and destinies. Last of the savage races which overflowed Europe, the Germans were the first to introduce the spirit of independence; the thirst for individual freedom. That bold and youthful spirit-that youth of man, who feels himself strong and free in a world which he appropriates to himself in anticipation-in forests of which he knows not the bounds-on a sea which wafts him to unknown shores-that spring of the unbroken horse which bears him to the Steppes and the Pampas-all worked in Alaric, when he swore that an unknown force impelled him to the gates of Rome; they impelled the Danish pirate when he rode on the stormy billow; they animated the Saxon outlaws when under Robin Hood they contended for the laws of Edward the Confessor against the Norman barons. That spirit of personal freedom, of unbounded personal pride, shines in all their writings, it is the invariable characteristic of the German theology and philosophy. From the day when, according to the beautiful German fable, the 'Wargus' scattered the dust on all his relations, and threw the grass over his shoulder, and resting on his staff, overleapt the frail paternal enclosure, and let his plume float to the wind-from that moment he aspired to the empire of the world. He deliberated with Attila whether he should overthrow the empire of the east or the west; he aspired with England to overspread the western and southern hemispheres.

DISREGARD OF THE PAST.

297

LXIV. DISREGARD OF THE PAST.

TALFOURD.

I HAVE observed, with sorrow, a prevailing disregard of the past, and a desire to extol the present, or to expatiate in visionary prospects of the future. I fear this may be traced not so much to philanthropy as to self-love, which inspires men with the wish personally to distinguish themselves as the teachers and benefactors of their species, instead of resting contented to share in the vast stock of recollections and

sympathies which is common to all. They would fain persuade us that mankind, created "a little lower than the angels," is now for the first time "crowned with glory and honor;" and they exultingly point to institutions of yesterday for the means to regenerate the earth. Some, for example, pronounce the great mass of the people, through all ages, as scarcely elevated above the brutes which perish, because the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic were not commonly diffused among them; and on the diffusion of these they ground their predictions of a golden age. And were there then no virtuous hardihood, no guileless innocence, no affections stronger than the grave, in that mighty lapse of years which we contemptuously stigmatize as dark? Are disinterested patriotism, conjugal love, open-handed hospitality, meek self-sacrifice, and chivalrous contempt of danger and of death, modern inventions? Has man's great birthright been in abeyance even until now? Oh, no! The Chaldæan shepherd did not cast his quiet gaze through weeks and years in vain to the silent skies. He knew not, indeed, the discoveries of science, which have substituted an immense variety of figures on space and distance, for the sweet influences of the stars; yet did the heavens tell to him the glory of God, and angel faces smile on him from the golden clouds. Booklearning is, perhaps, the least part of the education of the species. Nature is the mightiest and the kindliest of teachers. The rocks and unchanging hills give to the heart the sense of a duration beyond that of the perishable body. The flowing stream images to the soul an everlasting continuity of tranquil existence. The brave o'er-hanging firmament," even to the most rugged swain, imparts some consciousness of the universal brotherhood of those over whom it hangs.

LXV.-ON THE LAW OF COPYRIGHT.

TALFOURD..

THE liberality of genius is surely ill urged as an excuse for our ungrateful denial of its rights. The late Mr. Coleridge gave an example not merely of its liberality, but of its profuseness; while he sought not even to appropriate to his fame the vast intellectual treasures which he had derived from boundless research, and colored by a glorious imagination; while he scattered abroad the seeds of beauty and of wisdom to take root in congenial minds, and was content to witness their fruits in the productions of those who heard him. But ought we, therefore, the less to deplore, now when the music of his divine philosophy is forever hushed, that the earlier portion of those works on which he stamped his own impress-all which he desired of the world that it should recognize as his-is published for the gain of other than his children—that his death is illustrated by the forfeiture of their birthright? What justice is there in this? Do we reward our heroes thus ? Did we tell our Marlborough's, our Nelson's, our Wellington's, that glory was their reward, that they fought for posterity, and that posterity would pay them? We leave them to no such cold and uncertain requital; we do not even leave them merely to enjoy the spoils of their victories, which we deny to the author; we concentrate a nation's honest feeling of gratitude and pride into the form of an endowment, and teach other ages what we thought, and what they ought to think, of their deeds, by the substantial memorials of our praise. Were our Shakspeare and Milton less the ornaments of their country, less the benefactors of mankind? Would the example be less inspiring, if we permitted them to enjoy the spoils of their peaceful victories—if we allowed to their descendants, not the tax assessed by present gratitude and charged on the Future, but the mere amount which that future would be delighted to pay-extending as the circle of their glory expands, and rendered only by those who individually reap the benefits, and are contented at once to enjoy and reward its author? But I do not press these considerations to the full extent; the Past is beyond our power, and I only ask for the present a brief reversion in the Future.

TRUE POSITION OF NAPOLEON.

LXVI-HAMLET'S ADDRESS TO THE PLAYERS.

299

SHAKSPEARE.

SPEAK the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. offends me to the soul, to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows, and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'er-doing Termagant; it out-herods Herod Pray you, avoid it.

O, it

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor; suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'er-step not the modesty of nature for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first, and now, was, and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and the body of the time, his form and pressure. Now this, overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of which one, must, in your allowance, o'er-weigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players, that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly,—not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted, and bellowed, that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

LXVII-TRUE POSITION OF NAPOLEON.

CORMENIN.

BUT let us try to see Napoleon as he will be seen by the sages of posterity.

He has reigned as reign all the powers of this world, by the

force of his principle. He has fallen as fall all the powers of this world, by violence and the abuse of that principle. Greater than Alexander, than Charlemagne, than Peter, and than Frederick, he has, like them, impressed his name upon his age. Like them, he was a lawgiver. Like them, he founded an empire. His universal memory lives beneath the tents of the Arab, and traverses with the canoes of the savage, the distant rivers of the Oceanic Islands. The people of France, so ready to forget, of a revolution which has overturned the world have retained but his name. The soldiers in their bivouac talk of no other captain, and when they pass through the cities their eyes rest upon no other image.

When the people accomplished the Revolution of July, the banner, all trampled in the dust, which was raised anew by the soldier working-inen, extempore chiefs of the insurrection-this banner was the banner surmounted by the French eagle; it was the banner of Austerlitz, of Jena, and of Wagram, rather than that of Jemappes and of Fleurus; it was the banner which was planted on the towers of Lisbon, of Vienna, of Berlin, of Rome, of Moscow, rather than that which floated above the federacy of the Champ-de-Mars; it was the banner which had been riddled with balls at Waterloo; it was the banner which the emperor held embraced at Fontainebleau while bidding farewell to his old guard; it was the banner which shaded at St. Helena the face of the expiring hero; it was, in one word, to say all, the banner of Napoleon!

But stop, for on the other hand I hear muttering a severer voice, and fear that history, in her turn, prepares her indictment against him, and

"He dethroned the sovereignty of the people. He was Emperor of the French Republic, and he became despot. He threw the weight of his sword into the scales of the law. He incarcerated individual liberty in the state prisons. He stifled the freedom of the press under the gag of the censorship. He violated the trial by jury. He held in abasement and servitude the Courts, the Legislative Body, and the Senate. He depopulated the fields and the workshops. He grafted upon militarism a new nobility, which could not fail to become more insupportable than the ancient, because without the same antiquity, or the same prestiges. He levied arbitrary taxes. He meant there should be throughout the whole empire but one voice, his voice, but one law, his will.