



Produced by Mike Alder and Sue Asscher





THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

Contributions To The Edinburgh Review

By Thomas Babington Macaulay


VOLUME II.



CONTENTS.


CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW.

John Dryden. (January 1828.)

History. (May 1828.)

Mill on Government. (March 1829.)

Westminster Reviewer's Defence of Mill. (June 1829.)

Utilitarian Theory of Government. (October 1829.)

Sadler's Law of Population. (July 1830.)

Sadler's Refutation Refuted. (January 1831.)

Mirabeau. (July 1832.)

Barere. (April 1844.)




MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS OF LORD MACAULAY.




CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW.




JOHN DRYDEN. (January 1828.)


     "The Poetical Works of John Dryden".  In 2 volumes.
     University Edition.  London, 1826.


The public voice has assigned to Dryden the first place in the
second rank of our poets,--no mean station in a table of intellectual
precedency so rich in illustrious names. It is allowed that, even of
the few who were his superiors in genius, none has exercised a more
extensive or permanent influence on the national habits of thought and
expression. His life was commensurate with the period during which
a great revolution in the public taste was effected; and in that
revolution he played the part of Cromwell. By unscrupulously taking the
lead in its wildest excesses, he obtained the absolute guidance of it.
By trampling on laws, he acquired the authority of a legislator. By
signalising himself as the most daring and irreverent of rebels, he
raised himself to the dignity of a recognised prince. He commenced his
career by the most frantic outrages. He terminated it in the repose of
established sovereignty,--the author of a new code, the root of a new
dynasty.

Of Dryden, however, as of almost every man who has been distinguished
either in the literary or in the political world, it may be said that
the course which he pursued, and the effect which he produced, depended
less on his personal qualities than on the circumstances in which he was
placed. Those who have read history with discrimination know the fallacy
of those panegyrics and invectives which represent individuals
as effecting great moral and intellectual revolutions, subverting
established systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. The
difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the
superstitious crowd supposes. But the same feelings which in ancient
Rome produced the apotheosis of a popular emperor, and in modern Rome
the canonisation of a devout prelate, lead men to cherish an illusion
which furnishes them with something to adore. By a law of association,
from the operation of which even minds the most strictly regulated
by reason are not wholly exempt, misery disposes us to hatred, and
happiness to love, although there may be no person to whom our misery
or our happiness can be ascribed. The peevishness of an invalid vents
itself even on those who alleviate his pain. The good humour of a man
elated by success often displays itself towards enemies. In the
same manner, the feelings of pleasure and admiration, to which the
contemplation of great events gives birth, make an object where they
do not find it. Thus, nations descend to the absurdities of Egyptian
idolatry, and worship stocks and reptiles--Sacheverells and Wilkeses.
They even fall prostrate before a deity to which they have themselves
given the form which commands their veneration, and which, unless
fashioned by them, would have remained a shapeless block. They persuade
themselves that they are the creatures of what they have themselves
created. For, in fact, it is the age that forms the man, not the man
that forms the age. Great minds do indeed re-act on the society which
has made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what they
have received. We extol Bacon, and sneer at Aquinas. But, if their
situations had been changed, Bacon might have been the Angelical Doctor,
the most subtle Aristotelian of the schools; the Dominican might have
led forth the sciences from their house of bondage. If Luther had been
born in the tenth century, he would have effected no reformation. If
he had never been born at all, it is evident that the sixteenth century
could not have elapsed without a great schism in the church. Voltaire,
in the days of Louis the Fourteenth, would probably have been, like most
of the literary men of that time, a zealous Jansenist, eminent among the
defenders of efficacious grace, a bitter assailant of the lax morality
of the Jesuits and the unreasonable decisions of the Sorbonne. If Pascal
had entered on his literary career when intelligence was more general,
and abuses at the same time more flagrant, when the church was polluted
by the Iscariot Dubois, the court disgraced by the orgies of Canillac,
and the nation sacrificed to the juggles of Law, if he had lived to see
a dynasty of harlots, an empty treasury and a crowded harem, an army
formidable only to those whom it should have protected, a priesthood
just religious enough to be intolerant, he might possibly, like every
man of genius in France, have imbibed extravagant prejudices against
monarchy and Christianity. The wit which blasted the sophisms of
Escobar--the impassioned eloquence which defended the sisters of Port
Royal--the intellectual hardihood which was not beaten down even by
Papal authority--might have raised him to the Patriarchate of the