GLORY, renown or celebrity. The love of renown, or the desire of fame and reputation, appears to be one of the principal springs of human action. Glory, therefore, is not to be contemned, as some of the ancient philosophers affected to teach; but it imports us to regulate our pursuit of it by the dictates of reason; and if the public approbation follow not, the search must be abandoned. We ought to have our judgment well instructed as to what actions are truly glorious, and to remember, that in every important enterprise, as Seneca observes, Recte facti fecisse merces est, officii fructus ipsum officium est, the reward of a thing well done is to have done it, the fruit of a good office is the office itself. Those who by other methods contrive to place their names in many mouths, show that they rather seek after a great reputation than a good one, and their reward is oftener infamy than fame.

Men generally, and indeed almost instinctively, affix glory to such actions only as have been produced by an innate desire of public good; and this may be measured by that degree of influence which the thing done has upon the common happiness. If the actions of the hero conduct soonest to glory and with the greatest splendour, and if the victorious general is so great after a signal engagement, it is because the service he has performed is considered as a service done for all; and because we think without reflecting, that he has saved our habitations, our wealth, our children, and every thing that attaches us to life. If the man of science, who in his study has discovered and calculated the motions of the heavenly bodies, who in his alembics has detected some of the secrets of nature, or who has exhibited to mankind a new art, rises with less noise to fame, it is because the service which he renders is more widely diffused, and is often of less service to the present than to succeeding generations.

The consequences of these two advantages are, therefore, as opposite as the causes are different; and whilst the benefits secured by the warrior appear to exert no more influence, and his glory is obscured, that of a celebrated writer or inventor still increases, and becomes more and more enlarged. His works every day recall his name to the remembrance of those who read them, and thus still add to his celebrity and fame.

This posthumous fame indeed has been decried by some writers, and, in particular, the author of the Religion of Nature delineated has treated it as highly irrational and absurd. “In reality,” says he, “the man is not known ever the more to posterity, because his name is transmitted to them; he doth not live, because his name does. When it is said Julius Caesar subdued Gaul, conquered Pompey, &c., it is the same thing as to say, the conqueror of Pompey was Julius Caesar; that is, Caesar and the conqueror of Pompey is the same thing; Caesar is as much known by one designation as by the other. The amount then is only this, that the conqueror of Pompey conquered Pompey; or somebody conquered Pompey; or rather, since Pompey is as little known now as Caesar, somebody conquered somebody. Such a poor business is this boasted immortality, and such is the thing called glory among us! To discerning men this fame is mere air, and what they despise, if not shun.”

But surely it were to judge a little too curiously to view matters thus. For, as is observed by the judicious author of Fitzosborne’s Letters, although fame with posterity should be, in the strict analysis of it, no other than what is here described, a mere uninteresting proposition, amounting to nothing more than that somebody acted meritoriously; yet it would not necessarily follow, that true philosophy should banish the desire of it from the human breast; since this passion may be, as most certainly it is, wisely implanted in our species, notwithstanding the corresponding object should in reality be very different from what it appears in imagination. Do not many of our most refined and even contemplative pleasures owe their existence to our mistakes? It is but extending some of our senses to a higher degree of acuteness than we now possess them, to make the fairest views of nature, or the noblest productions of art, appear horrid and deformed. To see things as they truly are in themselves, would not always, perhaps, be of advantage to us in the intellectual world, any more than in the natural. But, after all, who shall certainly assure us that the pleasure of virtuous fame dies with its possessor, and reaches not to another scene of existence? There is nothing, it should seem, either absurd or unphilosophical [7:10:585]in supposing it possible, at least, that the praises of the good and the judicious, the sweetest music to an honest ear in this world, may be echoed back to the mansions of the next; that the poet’s description of Fame may be literally true, and that though she walks upon earth, she may yet lift her head into heaven.

To be convinced of the great advantage of cherishing this high regard to posterity, this noble desire of an after life in the breath of others, one need only look back upon the history of the ancient Greeks and Romans. For what other principle was it which produced that exalted strain of virtue in those days, which may well serve, in so many respects, as a model to these? Was it not the consentiens laus bonorum, the incorrupta vox bene judicantium, as Cicero calls it, “the concurrent approbation of the good, the uncorrupted applause of the wise,” that animated their most generous pursuits?

In short, can it be reasonable to extinguish a passion which nature has universally lighted up in the human breast, and which we constantly find burning with greatest strength and brightness in the noblest and best constituted natures? Accordingly, revelation is so far from endeavouring to eradicate the seed which nature has thus deeply implanted, that it rather seems, on the contrary, to cherish and forward the growth thereof. To be “exalted with honour,” and to be “had in everlasting remembrance,” are among the number of those encouragements which the Jewish dispensation offered to the virtuous; and the person from whom the sacred Author of the Christian system received his birth, is herself represented as rejoicing that “all generations would call her blessed.”