The Press. — London, England, 1857-03-28 00:00:00

312 should have felt so much sympathy for Wash ington as to become his historian. The Pensioner, for example, strove long and earnestly and ably to preserve his country from the domination of a monarch, and Rashington did the same for his; the Pen sioner had a headstrong, selfish, and ignorant people to struggle against, though he was really the champion of their cause, as he understood it, and the same was the case with Washington; the Pensioner, in short, in the words of Sir W. Temple, who knew him well, was " a man of unwearied industry, inflexible " constancy, sound, clear, and deep under " standing, with untainted integrity ; so that " whenever he was blinded it was by the " passion he had for that which he esteemed " the good and interest of his State "—a de scription which, with astonishing fidelity, is applicable to Washington. In fate alone these two eminent men differed—De Witt failed in his designs, and Washington succeeded in his ; the former was massacred by a villainous populace, and the latter Bud to receive the acknowledgments of a grateful people. In writing the history of Washington M. de Witt must, one would think, have had his great ancestor constantly in his mind ; yet he never once mentions nor even alludes to him. This is a piece of modesty which is really remarkable in these days of exaggerated vanity; and it prejudices one strongly in favour of the author and of his book. But M. de Witt has other and greater claims to attention than mere modesty. Diligent in searching for facts; skilful in sifting them; sagacious and profound in his appreciations of men and events ; of judicial impartiality;—he has the qualities which befit the man to aspire to the lofty dignity of the historian; and to these he adds a style of writing which is grave without pomposity, and eloquent without affectation. He has, consequently, produced a work which we should say is the best history of the American soldier statesman extant ; at least we have met none to be compared to it in English, French, or German—and yet we have read many in our time. As Englishmen, what has particularly pleased us in the book is, that it is not marked with that excessive adoration of Washington which it is the fashion of most writers, Europeans as well as native-born Americans, to adopt as a matter of course. We admit as cordially as anybody that Wash• ingten was a great patriot and a good man ; and we of course entertain no manner of sore ness against him for the share he had in stripping us of the American colonies. But we are not at all disposed to allow, as his fervent admirers demand, that the world never produced another fit to be compared to him ; for in Greece and Rome, in our own England, and even iu little Holland, in her De Witt, we find his equals in patriotlsm and worth, though they were not called on to show those qualities in exactly the same way. Still less can we allow, as the more fanatic of his adurers require the world to do, that he was even more perfect in every respect than it is given to man to be,—that he was, in fact, superhuman, almost divine; for he had his failings and his vices, and he did misdeeds. In exaggerating his undoubted grandeur and excellence, and in ignoring or altogether deny ing his defects and hackslidings, his partisans seem to us to make him almost as offensive and as silly as the monsters of physical beauty and moral perfection one meets with in foolish novels. It is not in man's nature to be so very sublime us he is represented to be; and to hold him up as more than man is absurd. M. de Witt has carefully avoided falling into suc'i ridiculous extravagance. Doubtless he entertains a very exalted opinion of his hero, and loses no opportunity of placing in its brightest light his ardent patriotism, his pro found political sagacity, his great military talents, his noble disinterestedness, his moral purity, his unaffected piety. But he gives the reverse of the medal as well. He shows that Washington must have been a cold, repulsive, and singularly unamiahle man : Washington knew little of the joys of intimacy. Reserved from prudence and taciturn by taste, he only very rarely placedi }' fr'ends, even the most faithful, in the secret of 'sentiments. THE PRESS. He is bound to admit, too, that, though faithful and attentive to his wife, he did not maintain with her that communion of heart with heart which constitutes true marriage; and, though he says it would be wrong to accuse him of "hardness of heart" because he " often expressed his most profound sena " ments with sobriety of language," he is obliged to confess that he did not always find " accents sufficiently pathetic to weep for the " members of his family Irhorn God took " away "; and as a proof of this he gives the cold, chilling letter which Washington wrote to his sister on the death of their mother However terrible and painful may be the death of a mother, there is a consolation in thinking that Heaven spared her to an age which few exceed, and accorded her to the end all the intellectual faculties and all the physical force that can be expected at eighty. These considera tions, and the hope that she has been removed to a better world, should teach her relatives to submit themselves to the decrees of the Creator. The great hero, M. de Witt tells us, could descend to the very small details of life, which are generally disregarded by men of lofty in tellect, or who are engaged in mighty enter prises. Here is a letter he wrote to a young man of his acquaintance : You should always have to go to church and for great occasions clothes that you don't put on every day. That need not occasion any expense. When you want new clothes those that were first reserved for Sundays and holidays may become the every-day ones, provided, how. ever, they be not of superior quality to the new. And here are a few of the articles for which he used to write with his own hand to Lon don ! Four papers of pins ; a bottle of anchovy sauce ; a large Cheshire cheese; ten loaves of sugar; six pocket•hand• kerchiefs. Disinterested though he was, his historian is obliged to write thus of him : The love of property, the passion for extending and im• proving his domains, is the sentiment which dominated him when he established himself at Mont Vernon. " Hunting out good lands," to use his own expression, was one of his favourite speculations. Constantly on the watch, he spied with avidity every occasion of making some useful encroachment on the desert ; . . . . he seized ou the lot which seemed to him the best. Further on, too, we read of his refusing to accept paper money, which was all the Revolu tionary Government had to offer in payment of debts due to him. Amongst the deeds with which Washington has to be reproached, is the military murder— for such it was—of the brave young English officer, Major Andre, and of the condemnation to death of Captain Asgill. M. de Witt ex cuses the latter as much as he tan, but he honestly confesses that the former leaves a " stain "on the fame of Washington. And not only did Washington cause the death ofAndre without just cause, but he had the barbarity to have him hanged on a gibbet, in spite of the victim's earnest appeal to him, on learning that his fate was irrevocably fixed, to be shot like a soldier. As, then, M. de Witt does not allow himself to be so blinded by his hero and his career as not to see the defects which existed in the character of the one, and the errors which marked the other, it is evident that his book possesses the rneritof impartiality, and that con sequently it ought to supersede those inflated biographies in which, partly from foolish enthu siasm, partly from hatred of England, Washing ton is represented as a demi-god without spot or stain. For Englishmen, at all events, it is the very book about Washington which they want; for though they, as cheerfully as any people, bear testimony to his noble, lofty, and ener getic qualities, they cannot be expected to shut their eyes to his faults. Even the Ame ricans themselves ought to accept it, for though it shows that their idol was but mortal after all, it still leaves him on a glorious pedestal, still warrants them in proudly saying of him as Antony of Brutus,— - - Ills life was gentle, and the elements So mud in him, that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, Mid was a man! We had almost omitted to mention that the History of M. de Witt is preceded by an essay on Washington by M. Guizot, which displays much of the loftiness of thought and chaste splendour of style for which he is re markable. In contributing this lucubration M. Guizot plainly intimates that he thinks the author worthy of hie high protection ; and SATURDAY, after reading the book, none will hesitate to deelare that the protégé dues honour to the patron. Liturgical Purity our Rightful Inheritance. By John C. Fisher, M.A , of the Middle Temple. London: Hamilton, Adams, and CO. THE author of this volume deserves the same respect for his courage and honesty as he is willing to concede to the most uncompro mising of his opponents. We have long desired to see the question at issue between the two great Church parties treated in this method, because we desire to substitute clear ness for confusion, and to enable men to see the extent of the doctrine either on one side or the other, in which they must be prepared to acquiesce, if they would remain members of the Church of England. Could men be brought to look these facts boldly in the face, we think it would have a great tendency to discourage the acrimonious party warfare of which the last twenty years have seen so much, to promote the growth of tolera tion, and to render the prosecution of either a Gorham or a Denison, a Hampden or a Pusey, of impossible recurrence. The design of Mr. Fisher, then, is to show that throughout the Liturgy of the Church of England what he terms the sacerdotal theory is unmistakeably enunciated—that not only by the canons, but also by the tct of Uni formity, the Liturgy is made equally binding with the Articles—and that the efforts of the Evangelical party to explain away the lan guage of the former can end in nothing but miserable failure ; and he comments with honourable indignation on the use of the term " non-natural," which has recently been received among us. Holding, then, that the language of the Liturgy and the Articles is hopelessly irreconcileable, and that it is con trary to both common sense and conscien tiousness to talk of interpreting the one by the other, he arrives at the conclusion that the Evangelical party must boldly take up arms to carry their own point; that they must destroy their opponents if they would not be destroyed themselves ; and that the present is a peculiarly favourable moment for com mencing an agitation that shall end in wiping out every vestige of Catholicism from the teaching of the Church. We agree with Mr. Fisher in everything except his conclusion. We do believe that as the aim of the Reformation was to widen, and not to contract, the channel of religious thought, the Liturgy and Articles of the Church do respectively represent the tenets of two theological schools, both of which the Church, by the mere fact of retaining both Liturgy and Articles, declares herself able to embrace. That such was the view of the Reformers Mr Fisher candidly admits ; and we all know that it was not upon doctrinal differences that the Romanists finally seceded from the Anglican communion. We should desire, therefore, to adhere to the design of the great doctors of the Reformation, and to preserve that latitude of opinion which has hitherto been one of the greatest blessings of the national Church. To argue as Mr. Fisher does, from the decision in the Gorham ease, that we have now to consider the expediency of vltering the baptismal service, seems to us like a reversal of the very principle on which that decision was founded. The High Church party had wished to enforce their own theory of baptism to the exclusion of every other ; this celebrated judgment forbade it to exer cise any such power. It is rather illogical, therefore, for those who would do precisely the same with the opposite doctrine to quote that judgment in their favour. We give two or three extracts in order to show that we have not perverted Mr. Fisher's meaning:— If, then, the voice of the Church, speaking by her own accredited authorities, be at all regarded ; it follows, that her Liturgy must, like every other composition, be esti• mated simply by its own phraseology; and that any appeal to the Articles, as being competent to overrule, ab extern°, its natural signification, is wholly beside the purpose of the pre sent discussion. Indeed the favourite expression of those who contend, upon this plea, that there is no real necessity for alteration, is a singularly unfortunate one for the credit even of their own cause. They talk of the Articles " governing " the interpretation of the Liturgy; a Wasnington a tt fram prudence f. pl . . aced his _nen 1 116166. bla e and hisi