sprinkling of Jews might help you prodigiously just | any other, the march of a Ministry which not at present; for, by what I hear about them, there only has pointed stakes at every ten yards, but a are nowhere such stiff sticklers against idolatry, toll-bar at every twenty. I tell you from my own at the present day, as those gentlemen! We both knowledge, that Ellenborough is only a coxcomb. are connected, to a certain extent, with the Uni- Respect him, for he is the greatest in the world: versity of Oxford. Now, people do tell me that and the head of every profession should be remany of those who voted for us, as well as many spected. What would you have? whom would of those who did not, are inclined to a spice you have? You are an aristocrat; you have your of it. title; and, no doubt, your landed estate. Would you send to govern India, as was done formerly, such men as Clive and Hastings? They could conquer and govern empires: what then? Could they keep Ministers and the friends of Ministers in their places? No such thing. Therefore, my good worthy Sir Robert Inglis, do not let us talk any more nonsense together. Our time is valuable; we have not too much left. Inglis. They deny the charge. Duke. Of course they do so do the people of Hindostan, even those among them who possess no pluralities, no preferment. They all tell you there is something at the bottom of it which you do not see, because you are blind and stupid and unbelieving. They all, both here and there, tell you that, to learn things rightly, you must become a child once more. Now, against the child's doctrine I have nothing to say, but I have a serious objection, in my own person, to certain parts of the discipline. Inglis. Your Grace is grave apparently, which could not surely be the case if such abomination were about to be tolerated in our principal seats of learning. Duke. In truth I was not thinking about the seats of learning: nor indeed do I see any danger in pious men erecting the Cross to elevate their devotion. I fear more the faggot than the solid timber and, when I know they came out of the same wood, I am suspicious they may be travelling the same road. But until an evil intention is manifest, I would let people have their own way, both in Oxfordshire and Hindostan. In regard to giving them money, I leave that matter entirely to the discretion of their votaries. Inglis. I grieve for this lukewarmness in your Grace. Duke. It is high time for me to be lukewarm, and hardly that. Inglis. I did not enter upon politics, or question an officer, a high, a very high functionary of her Majesty, in regard to the expediency of favoring one religion of the Hindoos against the other, and that professed by the more warlike and powerful. Duke. Did not you? Then what can you question? Inglis. I question, and more than question, the correctness of his views in winking at impurity; for the worship of the Lingam is most impure. Duke. We do wink at such things, Sir Robert; we do not openly countenance them. I am no worshipper of the Lingam. I speak as an unprejudiced man; and, depend upon it, if Lord Ellenborough had any tendency to that worship, the priests would make him undergo a rigorous examination, and probably would reject him after all. Nothing in his past life lays him open to such an imputation. Inglis. God forbid I should imply such an obscenity. Duke. Do not embarrass by this implication, or Inglis. Whatever, by God's Providence, we may still look forward to, let us devote to his service, repressing to the utmost of our power all attempts to aid or comfort a false and most impure religion. Duke. A bargain! we will; that is you and I. Let us enter into a compact, this very hour, never to worship the Lingam in word or deed. We will neither bow down to it nor worship it, nor do anything in word or deed which may point to such a conclusion. I promise furthermore, to use all my interest with her Majesty's Ministers, that they will immediately send a dispatch to Lord Ellenborough, ordering him not to set up the gates again in a temple which has ceased to exist for many centuries; but that, as the gates have been carried about a thousand miles, and as we have lost about as many men (to say nothing of field-pieces) in conveying them back, his Excellency do issue another proclamation, empowering six of the Generals and six of the Supreme Council, to leave India forthwith, bearing with them, to show the devotion both of Mahometans and Hindoos to her Majesty, a toothpick-case and twelve tooth-picks, made therefrom, for the use of her Majesty and her successors. Do you ride, Sir Robert Inglis? Inglis. I have no horses in town. Duke. My horse is waiting for me in the courtyard, and I think it proper to set my servants an example of punctuality. Perhaps I may have the pleasure of meeting you in the park. Inglis. I have occupied too much of your Grace's time? too much before, but steadily just where we are. | Peel, and the rest of them, all your suggestions. Politicians are neither lovers nor penitents. I see, In the meantime be a little patient; Juggernauth Sir Robert Inglis, you are in haste. I will lay before is not coming down St. James's-street. BISHOP SHIPLEY AND BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. Shipley. There are very few men, even in the bushes and the wildernesses, who delight in the commission of cruelty; but nearly all, throughout the earth, are censurable for the admission. When we see a blow struck, we go on and think no more about it yet every blow aimed at the most distant of our fellow creatures, is sure to come back, some time or other, to our families and descendants. He who lights a fire in one quarter is ignorant to what other the winds may carry it, and whether what is kindled in the wood may not break out again in the corn-field. Franklin. If we could restrain but one generation from deeds of violence, the foundation for a new and a more graceful edifice of society, would not only have been laid, but would have been consolidated. Shipley. We already are horrified at the bare mention of religious wars; we should then be horrified at the mention of political. Why should they who, when they are affronted or offended, abstain from inflicting blows, some from a sense of decorousness and others from a sense of religion, be forward to instigate the infliction of ten thousand, all irremediable, all murderous? Every chief magistrate should be arbitrator and umpire in all differences between any two, forbidding war. Much would be added to the dignity of the most powerful king by rendering him an efficient member of such a grand Amphictyonic council. Unhappily they are persuaded in childhood that a reign is made glorious by a successful war. What schoolmaster ever taught a boy to question it? or indeed any point of political morality, or any incredible thing in history? Cæsar and Alexander are uniformly clement: Themistocles died by a draught of bull's blood: Portia by swallowing red hot pieces of charcoal. Franklin. Certainly no woman or man could perform either of these feats. In my opinion it lies beyond a doubt that Portia suffocated herself by the fumes of charcoal; and that the Athenian, whose stomach must have been formed on the model of other stomachs, and must therefore have rejected a much less quantity of blood than would have poisoned him, died by some chemical preparation, of which a bull's blood might, or might not, have been part. Schoolmasters who thus betray their trust, ought to be scourged by their scholars, like him of their profession who underwent the just indignation of the Roman Consul. You shut up those who are infected with the plague; why do you lay no coercion on those who are incurably possessed by the legion devil of carnage? When a creature is of intellect so perverted that he can discern no difference between a review and a battle, between the animating bugle and the dying groan, it were expedient to remove him, as quietly as may be, from his devastation of God's earth and his usurpation of God's authority. Compassion points out the cell for him at the bottom of the hospital, and listens to hear the key turned in the ward: until then the house is insecure. Shipley. God grant our rulers wisdom, and our brethren peace! Franklin. Here are but indifferent specimens and tokens. Those fellows throw stones pretty well if they practise much longer, they will hit us: let me entreat you, my Lord, to leave me here. So long as the good people were contented with hooting and shouting at us, no great harm was either done or apprehended: but now they are beginning to throw stones, perhaps they may prove themselves more dexterous in action than their rulers have done latterly in council. Shipley. Take care, Doctor Franklin! That was very near being the philosopher's stone. Franklin. Let me pick it up, then, and send it to London by the diligence. But I am afraid your ministers, and the nation at large, are as little in the way of wealth as of wisdom, in the experiment they are making. Shipley. While I was attending to you, William had started. Look! he has reached them: they are listening to him. Believe me, he has all the courage of an Englishman and of a Christian; and, if the stoutest of them force him to throw off his new black coat, the blusterer would soon think it better to have listened to less polemical doctrine. Franklin. Meantime a few of the town-boys are come nearer, and begin to grow troublesome. I am sorry to requite your hospitality with such hard fare. Shipley. True, these young bakers make their bread very gritty, but we must partake of it together so long as you are with us. Franklin. Be pleased, my lord, to give us grace; our repast is over; this is my boat. Shipley. We will accompany you as far as to the ship. Thank God! we are now upon the water, and all safe. Give me your hand, my good Doctor Franklin! and although you have failed in the object of your mission, yet the intention will authorise me to say, in the holy words of our divine Redeemer, Blessed are the peacemakers! Franklin. My dear lord! if God ever blessed a man at the intercession of another, I may reasonably and confidently hope in such a benediction. Never did one arise from a warmer, a tenderer, or a purer heart. Shipley. Infatuation! that England should sacrifice to her king so many thousands of her bravest men; and ruin so many thousands of her most industrious, in a vain attempt to destroy the very principles on which her strength and her glory are founded! The weakest prince that ever sat upon a throne, and the most needy and sordid parliament that ever pandered to distempered power, are thrusting our blindfold nation from the pinnacle of prosperity. Franklin. I believe your king (from this moment it is permitted me to call him ours no longer) to be as honest and as wise a man as any of those about him: but unhappily he can see no difference between a review and a battle. Such are the optics of most kings and rulers. His parliament, in both houses, acts upon calculation. There is hardly a family, in either, that does not anticipate the clear profit of several thousands a-year, to itself and its connections. Appointments to regiments and frigates raise the price of papers; and forfeited estates fly confusedly about, and darken the air from the Thames to the Atlantic. Shipley. It is lamentable to think that war, bringing with it every species of human misery, should become a commercial speculation. Bad enough when it arises from revenge; another word for honour. Franklin. A strange one indeed! but not more strange than fifty others that come under the same title. Wherever there is nothing of religion, nothing of reason, nothing of truth, we come at once to honour; and here we draw the sword, dispense with what little of civilisation we ever pretended to, and murder or get murdered, as may happen. But these ceremonials both begin and end with an appeal to God, who, before we appealed to him, plainly told us we should do no such thing, and that he would punish us most severely if we did. And yet, my lord, even the gentlemen upon your bench turn a deaf ear to him on these occasions: nay, they go further; they pray to him for success in that which he has forbidden so strictly, and when they have broken his commandment, thank him. Upon seeing these mockeries and impieties age after age repeated, I have asked myself whether the depositaries and expounders of religion have really any whatever of their own; or rather, like the lawyers, whether they do not defend professionally a cause that otherwise does not interest them in the least. Surely, if these holy men really believed in a just retributive God, they would never dare to utter the word war, without horror and deprecation. Shipley. Let us attribute to infirmity what we must else attribute to wickedness. Franklin. Willingly would I: but children are whipt severely for inobservance of things less evident, for disobedience of commands less audible and less awful. I am loth to attribute cruelty to your order: men so entirely at their ease have seldom any. Certain I am that several of the bishops would not have patted Cain upon the back while he was about to kill Abel; and my wonder is that the very same holy men encourage their brothers in England to kill their brothers in America; not one, not two nor three, but thousands, many thousands. Shipley. I am grieved at the blindness with which God has afflicted us for our sins. These unhappy men are little aware what combustibles they are storing under the church, and how soon they may explode. Even the wisest do not reflect on the most important and the most certain of things; which is, that every act of inhumanity and injustice goes far beyond what is apparent at the time of its commission; that these, and all other things, have their consequences; and that the consequences are infinite and eternal. If this one truth alone could be deeply impressed upon the hearts of men, it would regenerate the whole human race. Franklin. In regard to politics, I am not quite certain whether a politician may not be too farsighted: but I am quite certain that, if it be a fault, it is one into which few have fallen. The policy of the Romans in the time of the republic, seems to have been prospective. Some of the Dutch also, and of the Venetians, used the telescope. But in monarchies the prince, not the people, is consulted by the minister of the day; and what pleases the weakest supersedes what is approved by the wisest. Shipley. We have had great statesmen: Burleigh, Cromwell, Marlborough, Somers: and whatever may have been in the eyes of a moralist the vices of Walpole, none ever understood more perfectly, or pursued more steadily, the direct and palpable interests of the country. Since his administration, our affairs have never been managed by men of business; and it was more than could have been expected that, in our war against the French in Canada, the appointment fell on an able commander. Franklin. Such an anomaly is unlikely to recur. You have in the English parliament (I speak of both houses) only two great men; only two considerate and clear-sighted politicians; Chatham and Burke. Three or four can say clever things; several have sonorous voices; many vibrate sharp comminations from the embrasures of portentously slit sleeves; and there are those to be found who deliver their oracles out of wigs as worshipful as the curls of Jupiter, however they may be grumbled at by the flour-mills they have laid under such heavy contribution; yet nearly all of all parties want alike the sagacity to discover that in striking America you shake Europe; that kings will come out of the war either to be victims or to be despots; and that within a quarter of a century they will be hunted down like vermin by the most servile nations, or slain in their palaces by their own courtiers. In a peace of twenty years you might have paid off the greater part of your national debt, indeed as much of it as it would be expedient to discharge, and you would have left your old enemy France labouring and writhing under the intolerable and increasing weight of hers. This is the only way in which you can ever quite subdue her; and in this you subdue her without a blow, without a menace, and without a wrong. As matters now stand, you are calling her from attending to the corruptions of her court, and inviting her from bankruptcy to glory. Shipley. I see not how bankruptcy can be averted by the expenditure of war. down on the offenders a less severe retribution, Franklin. It can not. But war and glory are the same thing to France, and she sings as shrilly and as gaily after a beating as before. With a subsidy to a less amount than she has lately been accustomed to squander in six weeks, and with no more troops than would garrison a single fortress, she will enable us to set you at defiance, and to do you a heavier injury in two campaigns than she has been able to do in two centuries, although your king was in her pay against you. She will instantly be our ally, and soon our scholar. Afterward she will sell her crown-jewels and her church-jewels, which cover the whole kingdom, and will derive unnatural strength from her vices and her profligacy. You ought to have conciliated us as your ally, and to have had no other, excepting Holland and Denmark. England could never have, unless by her own folly, more than one enemy. Only one is near enough to strike her; and that one is down. All her wars for six hundred years have not done this; and the first trumpet will untrance her. You leave your house open to incendiaries while you are running after a refractory child. Had you laid Franklin. Folly hath often the same results as down the rod, the child would have come back. Wisdom: but Wisdom would not engage in her And because he runs away from the rod, you take school-room so expensive an assistant as Calamity. up the poker. Seriously, what means do you There are, however, some noisy and unruly childpossess of enforcing your unjust claims and inso-ren whom she alone has the method of rendering lent authority. Never since the Norman Conquest had you an army so utterly inefficient, or generals so notoriously unskilful: no, not even in the reign of that venal traitor, that French stipendiary, the second Charles. Those were yet living who had fought bravely for his father, and those also who had vanquished him and Victory still hovered over the mast that had borne the banners of our Commonwealth ours, ours, my Lord! the word is the right word here. Shipley. I am depressed in spirit, and can sympathise but little in your exultation. All the crimes of Nero and Caligula are less afflicting to humanity, and consequently we may suppose will bring tame and tractable : perhaps it may be by setting them to their tasks both sore and supperless. The ship is getting under weigh. Adieu once more, my most revered and noble friend! Before me in imagination do I see America, beautiful as Leda in her infant smiles, when her father Jove first raised her from the earth; and behind me I leave England, hollow, unsubstantial, and broken, as the shell she burst from. Shipley. O worst of miseries, when it is impiety to pray that our country may be successful. Farewell! may every good attend you! with as little of evil to endure or to inflict, as national sins can expect from the Almighty. BLUCHER AND SANDT. Blucher. Pardon an intrusion ere sunrise. Do believe to be true, but more are false which we not move for me. Sandt. Sir, I was not seated, nor inclined to be. Sitting is the posture in which a prisoner has a deeper sense of solitude and helplessness. In walking there is the semblance of being free; and in standing there is a preparation for walking. But perhaps these are only the vague ideas of my situation. Many things are true which we do not do not suspect of falsehood. Blucher. So early a visit, or indeed any, may be unwelcome on such a day. Sandt. To one unprepared it might be. But we are scarcely so early as you think we are. The walls indeed do not yet bear upon them the pleasant pink hue of sunrise; a rich decoration which (I am sorry to think it) some other cells are per haps deprived of; but within a few minutes you | legged stool. And now we are side by side, may will discover the only thing in the apartment not | I look at you? Blucher. I have seen many brave men; I can not see too many. yet visible. Presently you shall see the spider's- Sandt. As you will. Blucher. I never thought about the matter. Blucher. No indeed; not until lately. But why have they walled up your chimney? could not they have contracted it, if they feared your escape? Sandt. Ah! how we puzzle one another with our questions! Do not inquire why they have done it: thank them rather, if you are my friend, thank them with me for sparing to take down the mantelpiece. Blucher. A narrow slip of lime-washed stone. Sandt. Wide enough for a cider-glass with a flower in it. I should be unwilling to have a bird so near me just at present; but a flower! I love to have a flower. It leads me back, with its soft cool touch, into the fields and into the garden; it was nurtured by the heavens; it has looked at them in its joyousness; and it leaves all for me! Thou hast been out upon the dew, my little one! thou hast seen everything as I saw it last; thou comest to show me the colours of the dawn, the carelessness of boyhood, the quiet veins and balmy breath of innocence, the brief seclusion and the sound sleep of Sandt. Are you going? Blucher. No. Sandt. The brave are confined in the fortresses; in places less healthy than this. Somebody has misled you. Blucher. Confined in the fortresses! in places less healthy than prisons! the landwehr! the restorers . . . Have you slept well? I hope you have; I do think you have; you look composed. Sandt. Many thanks! I have indeed. Blucher. Soundly as usual? Sandt. My sleep was like spring; if inconstant and fitful, yet kindly and refreshing; such as becomes the forerunner of a season more settled and more permanent. It has invigorated me for the journey I am to take: I wait in readiness. Blucher. Blessings upon you! blessings and glory! Sandt. Leave me blessings: glory lies within them where they are not, she is not. Blucher. If I tell you that I am one of the same society with yourself, one of the same heart in its kind, though smaller and harder, you may doubt me: you may imagine me some privy councillor in his gentleness come to untwine and wheedle your secrets out of you; or some literator, in his zeal for truth, in his affection for science, in his spirit of confraternity, come to catch your words and oil his salad with them. Sandt. If you are that (but surely you can not be) and poor also, I will answer you enough to produce you, in this moment of public curiosity, Sandt. You turned away from me. I grew a small pittance for your family. tedious. Blucher. I have not yet given you time, nor you me. What are you looking at on the naked wall? Sandt. I was looking at the reflection of the window-bars against it. Blucher. You see I am old, and wear an old coat. Sandt. Go on. I have given my promise, and would yet give it, had I not. We have no time to spare. Let me direct you by the straightest road Blucher. And yet you appeared to look at them to your business. I had no accomplice, no instiwith pleasure and satisfaction. Sandt. Did I? Perhaps I did. Their milder apparitions have been my daily visitors. Unobtrusive, calm, consolatory, they teach me by their transience and evanescence that imprisonment is merely a shadow, as they are; that life is equally so; that the one can not long detain us; that we can not long detain the other; and that our enlargement and departure are appointed from above. See how indistinct and how wide-open they are become already. I fell into talking about myself; and, what is worse, I now begin to moralise. An invitation to sit down with one condemned, might be offensive. Blucher. Assure me that I do not offend, and let me assure you I will not be offended. Suspect me, doubt me, interrogate me, and, if you find reason for it, reproach me. Sandt. I have no right nor will. Blucher. Then let us sit together at the foot of the pallet. I would not assume the post of honour, to which I have no right, by taking the three gator, no adviser, in letting fall the acid drop which removed one stain from Germany. Here is enough for your three volumes, three hundred pages each. Yes; I see the holes; and you may put the hand into that rent. Blucher. It is a coat which many a ball has hissed at, and many a courtier whom I cared as little for. Sandt. May I serve one man more ere I depart! and may he have been, or live to be, an honest one! Blucher. Is Blucher? Sandt. The Kosciusko of Germany, the Washington of Europe. Blucher. In wishes only. Sandt. What news about him? Be explicit and expeditious. Blucher. He passes yet one hour with thee, O saint without arrogance! O patriot without imposture ! Sandt. Where am I? Blucher. Not yet in heaven, although thy looks express it. |