The Press.
London, England, 1858-08-14 00:00:00

THE RES SI AUGUST 14i 1858.

wanted. A very good life of Savonarola appeared
in the Ouarrerly Review some time since, based
on the work of Perrens, which Mr. Colquhoun
has consulted, and avoiding an error into which
he seems to us to have fallen,—that of con-
sidering Savonarola as anything but a Romanist.
Mr. Colquhoun has evidently strong Protestant
feelings, and he seems to view Savonarola as a
sort of precursor of Luther, simply because he
opposed the Pope. We believe that he opposed
the Pope, not because he had any doubts of the
supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, or indeed of
any part of the Romish system,—but because
the Bishop of Rome happened to be Alexander
the Sixth. With regard to the sketches of
Marguerite d'Angouhlme and Jeanne d'Albret,
we do not see that Mr. Colquhoun has at all gone
beyond Miss Freer (to whose works, by the
way, he seems to be a good deal indebted), or to
have added anythinc, to our knowledge on the
subject. The sketch of Olympia Morata stands
on a different ground ; and as her story has
not of late years been presented in an English
dress, we are thankful to Mr. Colquhoun for his
treatment of it, which is lucid and informing,
though, like the rest, somewhat overlaid with
ambitious fantasias on the original theme. As
we have said, we have assumed this sketch to be
an amplification of the one in the Dublin
University Magazine. In the latter, some of
Olympia's Greek compositions are quoted, and
this is a point which Mr. Colquhoun would have
done better not to omit in his volume ; the lady's
speciality having been her scholarship quite as
much as her piety. However 4, those who
come fresh to the subjects of " Life in the Olden
Time" it will doubtless be found to contain a
good deal that is interesting, and even the well-
informed will find it readable enough. We
ourselves have no fault to find with it except on
the score of the want of originality, both of style
and matter, to which we have referred.

History of the Romans under the Empire. By
Charles Merlynle, late Fellow of St. John's
College, Cambridge. Vol. VI. London :
Longmans.

OF the writers who have undertaken during the
last thirty years to describe to Englishmen the
greatness and the decline of the master-states of
antiquity, Mr. Merivale is now undoubtedly the
third name. Nor would we presume to declare
that he deserves to be placed in order of merit
below die two great writers whom he succeeds in
order or time. it is, however, beyond question
that no fourth name ought in this department to
be put in competition with the names of Thin--
wall, Grote, and Merivale. Mitford is already for-
gotten ; and Arnold—with a freshness of historic
imagination which perhaps not one of the three his-
tbrianS we have mentioned naturally possessed,
and in the unaffected dignity of his style easily
transcending them all—was prevented by busi-
ness, by untimely death, by the hopeless obscurity
of the period which he lived to treat, and perhaps
also by some prejudices, from accomplishing all
that seemed to be within his reach. Mr. Men--
vale has devoted many years of tranquil retire-
ment to his task, and he has chosen a field in
which both much remained to be done and there
were extraordinary facilities for doing it. lie has
not laboured in vain : the sixth lume of his
history, which has been recently presented to the
public, is to our mind one of the most interesting
volumes of history which have been produced in
our age. Some chapters have a little disappointed
us, but the fault has very possibly been rather
our own than Mr. Merivale's. We had hoped
for more light upon the 13atavian rebellion of
Civilis than we have gained, and many passages
in the previous volumes had seemed to us to con-
vey an intimation that Mr. Merivale expected
his account of the Jewish war to be the master-
piece of his history. Reading it accordingly with
these thoughts in our mind, we have found that
most exciting contest described with a brevity
and nonchalance which has surprised us. But
the interest which attaches to these volunies is
not due to any episodes, but springs film the
intrinsic and unique peculiarity of the principal
subject. And it ought to be mentioned as a
capital merit in this history that it is not like a
novel by Sir Walter Scott, which enlists the
sympathy of the reader for every personage intro-
duced except the hero and heroine, and that as it
is salted a " History of Rothe under the gni,

777

perors," it really is so, the author being himself
at Rome in spirit throughout and keeping his
readers at Rome, even when the narrative wanders
for a while to the Rhine, or to old Greece, or to
the stately Broadway of Antioch, or to the meet-
ing of the two ravines under the steep escarp-
ment of Mount Sion.

We have, however, no intention just now of
reviewing at large this beautiful and important
work. We have been strongly interested by the
brilliant, comprehensive, and searching examina-
tion which it contains of the literature of the
age of Nero. If we consider literature as an
index—and perhaps there is no better index—of
the spirit of an age, a comparison of the books
which have come down to us from the time of
Nero with those of the Augustan age, furnishes
a measure of the declension of Roman greatness
and manners which had taken place during the
interval. And it is the more important to obtain
such a measure because the characteristic of
Imperial Rome, and that which alone makes its
history worth studying, is the progressive decline
of everything distinctively Roman in virtue, in
manners, in literature, in the arts of life. For
models of virtue we look elsewhere; if we wish
to find "what makes a nation happy and keeps
"it so," Imperial Rome will not help us in our
researches. But if it be important to know the
causes and the symptoms of national decline, and
how far the maxim of physical philosophers that
birth conies out of death, and new forms out of
the dissolution of forms, may be true in morals
and politics, then there is no period in history
which can throw half so much light upon this
as the successive centuries of the gradual and
orderly decline of Rome, not precipitated by
foreign invasion nor interrupted by any revival
of the sick and failing spirit, at whose deathbed
the whole world attended in awe, in deep disgust,
and in despair of the future.

Mr. Merivale has now described to us the first
stages of this long decay. On the present occa-
sion we select a single very partial aspect of an
extensive subject. The following passage is to
be the text ot our discourse :
It had become irksome to men of age end experlefiee to
mingle in public affairs which they w.'re not suffered to
conduct, and the young competitors for civil distinction
were left without control to indulge the ardour of specu-
lative opinion. There was no moral check on their
thoughts, none on their speech ; the new impulse given
to popular composition by the advent of Nero to power
raised a lace of schoolboys to illegitimate authority in the
world of letters. Young Rome of the time of Nero was
eminently conceited, and, I fear, eminently shallow. Placing
Seneca at their head, as is the wont of the rising genera-
tion to shelter under a great name its own conscious self•
distrust, the favourites of the prince, accepted at the same
time as the favourites of the multitude, overbore the finer
taste and judgment of the veterans of literature. The faults
and vices of youth were admired, humoured, and stimulated.
Reserve end modesty, persevering toil, patier.t self-exami-
nation, were regarded as irksome in themselves, and as a
reflection on the character of the prince. Talent flobrighed
in such an atmosphere as in a forcing-house, but it was no
climate for the natural ripening of genius. The wit and
cleverness of Lucan considering his years is preternatural;
the trumpet-tones of his scorn or admiration. after more
than thirty years' familiarity, still thunder in my ears with
a startling intensity : but he has no divination of men anti
things ; his imaginstisn never clothes itself in the costume
of the past; he is never transported out of himself; be
never sow the conqueror of the (huts ; he never trod the
plains of lEmathia. If he is to be compared at all with
the inspired singer of the /Eneid, pensige, passionate, and
abstracted, I know not that anything More to his advan-
tage cm be said than the remark of his admirer Stating,
that the epic of Liman was an earlier effort than the first
prolusions of Virgil.
This striking criticism is, we think, just, so far
as it bears upon the class to which Lucan be-
longed, and upon the faults of his poem. We
may remark in passing that upon the merits of
the poet himself we have not the materials for
forming a judgment. We know only that before
he was twenty-six years of age he produced a
poem of astonishing power and full of glaring
Units. 'What the energy of such a mind might
have accomplished if a few more years had been
allowed it for growth we know no more than we
could have predicted what Shakespeare was to do
it' he had died immediately after writing Pericles
and nits Andronicus. But it is more important to
observe what a lesson the appearance of such a
poet as Lucan ought to read to hasty historical
generalizers. It is not uncommonly declared by
such persons that all poetical energy expires
under the withering breath of tyranny, and that
the poets of despotism are narrow, cold, correct,
while those of liberty are full of thought, various,
vigorous, and perhaps irrcgular• At licoula the

778

effect of despotism was precisely contrary to this.
At the time when, if a despotism existed, it ex-
isted under a disguise, when pains were taken to
allow the subject as much liberty as was consistent
with the security of the sovereign, and when the
government of the despot was perhaps felt by the
world at large to be easy and tolerant compared
with that of the aristocracy he had superseded,
poets were narrow, correct, and austere. When
that despotism tightened its reins and used the
whip more freely, when liberty became an ill-
understood tradition, when flattery grew more
abject and shameless than it has perhaps ever
been in the world before or since, appears the ir-
regular, energetic genius, the speculative, fertile,
and daring spirit of Lucan. The slave of Nero
moves freely and speaks with little reserve : the
revered friend of Augustus writes with constraint;
his mind seems to move in a narrower circle; his
enthusiasm is more chastened, his genius tamer.
The fact is that the wildness and the variety
of Lucan, which may be pleasing to a modern,
was in a Roman unnatural, and a mark of feverish
excitement. Steadfast adherence to two or three
principles was the Roman characteristic. They
were slow, punctual, practical, and had much
greater satisfaction in practising one old maxim
than in inventing a score of new ones. They
had no love for novelties—little inquisitiveness
or love of knowledge for its own sake. Their
mythology was meagre, but they had more faith
in Jupiter and Minerva than the Greeks had in
Athene or in Zeus. They were rustics, born to
cultivate all the simple and strenuous virtues.
Virgil's poetry reflects this character. He utters
few fine sentiments about the gods, but he seems
to have a practical belief in them. He believes
in them as simply as if they had been men,
and never feels tempted to resolve them into
symbols or personifications of the moral virtues.
Although the subject of his poem is the imperial
greatness of Rome, and the valour by which it
was to bring all nations into subjection, and
though he was himself a scholar, yet his spirit is
that of an Italian farmer, and he appears to know
little and care little about the manners and the
religions of the nations of whose subjection to his
own countrymen he was so proud. It is a proof
of the change which was gradually taking place
in the Roman character that in Lucan all this is
reversed. In his time, Syrians, Gauls, Egyptians,
Greeks, had lived for half a century side by side
with their conquerors, in common subjection to
an autocrat. A vast process of fusion was going
forward ; fusion of all things—of religions, of
manners, of populations. Lucan's poetry reflects
this fusion. He delights in pouring out miscel-
laneous information about foreign nations, their
institutions, the countries in which they live.
He delights in descriptions of foreign religious
rites. An unappeasable curiosity has taken the
place of the old Roman indifference. And
further, scepticism has superseded the old Roman
faith. Faith there is none in Lucan, but an in-
tellectual belief in a Supreme Necessity, alter-
nating with a suspicion that the true sovereign
of the world is chance. Lucan was no philo-
sopher, but, after the fashion of the day, a smat-
terer in all the learning of the age. Hence he
does not consistently support the Stoical doc-
trines which he would wish to be considered his
creed; and every now and then some descrip-
tion of the mysteries of magic, written with all
the disgusting vividness of which an imagination
fed on blood and carnage would alone be capable,
reveals the cringing superstition of scepticism,
from which Stoicism in such dangerous times
was powerless to deliver him.
But with this absence of a creed both moral
and religious is combined in Lucan a capacity
quite unknown to Virgil of saying the finest pos-
sible things upon every moral and religious
question. Ile could have drawn up a system of
doctrine much more amiable, much more worthy
of belief than the rude creed which Virgil had
inherited. The difference between the two lay
in this, that Virgil believed in his creed, such as
it was, and that Lucan did not believe in his.
The fancy creed of a sceptic is generally a more
admirable thing than the creed for which a be-
liever will perish at the stake. For the believer
takes his creed as he finds it, with all the super-
stitions which in the lapse of time may have
gathered round it; he takes the bad with the
good, for he does not commonly venture to ques-
tion either. The sceptic knows how to discrimi-
nate that which is worthy of belief from that.

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