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macy, and his memoirs down to 1679 are occupied with foreign affairs. In 1677 he had rendered his country one of the greatest services that any man ever did, by bringing about, in conjunction with Danby, the marriage of William of Orange with the Princess Mary; and in 1679 he found himself, to his discomfort and dismay-for if wise as a serpent he was timid as a dove-charged with the mission. of reconciling king and people, who, from the discovery of Charles's baseness in accepting a pension from France, seemed on the verge of entire estrangement. Temple attempted to attain this end by the creation of a council of thirty advisers, as a perpetual check upon the king's actions. The scheme might have succeeded if thirty disinterested politicians had been forthcoming; but the entire kingdom could barely have furnished the number requisite for the redemption of Sodom. Temple's memoirs give a lively picture of the mortifications he underwent as he gradually dwindled into a cipher; but the modern reader will prefer to study the story in Macaulay's famous essay, which, if exaggerated in his expression of scorn for Temple's irresolution, is not unfair as a statement of fact. At length he escaped to his books and gardens, and spent the rest of his life in the enjoyment of a character for consummate statesmanship, which he took care never to bring to the test. Wisdom and virtue he certainly did possess, but both with him were too much of the self-regarding order. His claims to rank as a restorer of English prose are better founded, though these, too, have been exaggerated. Johnson's assertion that Temple was the first writer who attended to cadence in English prose merely evinces how completely the power of appreciating the grand harmonies of the Elizabethan period had died out in the eighteenth century. He must, notwithstanding, be allowed an honourable place among those who have rendered English

prose lucid, symmetrical, and adapted for business; and Macaulay has justly pointed out that the apparent length of his sentences is mainly a matter of punctuation. The elegance of the writer, and the egotistic caution of the man, are excellently represented by the concluding passage of his Memoirs :

'Upon the survey of all these circumstances, conjunctions, and dispositions, both at home and abroad, I concluded in cold blood, that I could be of no further use or service to the king my master, and my country, whose true interests I always thought were the same, and would be both in danger when they came to be divided, and for that reason had ever endeavoured the uniting them; and had compassed it, if the passions of some few men had not lain fatally in the way, so as to raise difficulties that I saw plainly were never to be surmounted. Therefore, upon the whole, I took that firm resolution, in the end of the year 1680, and the interval between the Westminster and Oxford parliaments, never to charge myself more with any public employments; but retiring wholly to a private life, in that posture take my fortune with my country, whatever it should prove: which as no man can judge, in the variety of accidents that attend human affairs, and the chances of every day, to which the greatest lives as well as actions are subject; so I shall not trouble myself so much as to conjecture: fata viam inveniant.

'Besides all these public circumstances, I considered myself in my own humour, temper, and dispositions, which a man may disguise to others, though very hardly, but cannot to himself. I had learned by living long in courts and public affairs, that I was fit to live no longer in either. I found the arts of a court were contrary to the frankness and openness of my nature; and the constraints of public business too great for the liberty of my humour and my life. The common and proper ends of both are the advancement of men's fortunes; and that I never minded, having as much as I needed, and, which is more, as I desired. The talent of gaining riches I ever despised, as observing it to belong to the most despisable men in other kinds: and I had the occasions of it so often in my way, if I would have made use

of them, that I grew to disdain them, as a man does meat that he has always before him. Therefore, I never could go to service for nothing but wages, nor endure to be fettered in business when I thought it was to no purpose. I knew very well the arts of a court are, to talk the present language, to serve the present turn, and to follow the present humour of the prince, whatever it is: of all these I found myself so incapable, that I could not talk a language I did not mean, nor serve a turn I did not like, nor follow any man's humour wholly against my own. Besides, I have had, in twenty years experience, enough of the uncertainty of princes, the caprices of fortune, the corruption of ministers, the violence of factions, the unsteadiness of counsels, the infidelity of friends; nor do I think the rest of my life enough to make any new experiments.

'For the ease of my own life, if I know myself, it will be infinitely more in the retired, than it has been in the busy scene: for no good man can, with any satisfaction, take part in the divisions of his country, that knows and considers, as I do, what they have cost Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Florence, Germany, France and England: nor can the wisest man foresee how ours will end, or what they are like to cost the rest of Christendom as well as ourselves. I never had but two aims in public affairs; one, to see the king great as he may be by the hearts of his people, without which I know not how he can be great by the constitutions of this kingdom: the other, in case our factions must last, yet to see a revenue established for the constant maintaining a fleet of fifty men of war, at sea or in harbour, and the seamen in constant pay; which would be at least our safety from abroad, and make the crown still considered in any foreign alliances, whether the king and his parliaments should agree or not in undertaking any great or national war. And such an establishment I was in hopes the last parliament at Westminster might have agreed in with the king, by adding so much of a new fund to three hundred thousand pounds a year out of the present customs. But these have both failed, and I am content to have failed with them.

'And so I take leave of all those airy visions which have so long busied my head about mending the world; and at the same time, of all those shining toys or follies that employ the thoughts

of busy men and shall turn mine wholly to mend myself; and, as far as consists with a private condition, still pursuing that old and excellent counsel of Pythagoras, that we are, with all the cares and endeavours of our lives, to avoid diseases in the body, perturbations in the mind, luxury in diet, factions in the house, and seditions in the state.'

CHAPTER XI.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY,

Two private diarists, whose autobiographic records remained unknown to their contemporaries, have justly obtained classic rank by the publication of their records in the nineteenth century. One of these, Samuel Pepys, stands incontestably at the head of the world's literature in his own department. John Evelyn, possessing neither the humour, the naïveté, the shrewdness, or the uncompromising frankness of his rival and friend, occupies a much lower place as an autobiographer, though more highly endowed as a scholar and a man of letters. Born in 1620 of a prosperous county family, whose fortune had been made by the manufacture of gunpowder, he found himself an idle young Templar at the outbreak of the Civil War. Three days' service in the royal army sufficed him, and in 1643 he obtained the king's permission to travel. This does not seem very heroic conduct, but the family estate, lying at Wotton, near Dorking, was probably in the actual occupation of the Parliamentarians. He remained

abroad until 1647, and his notes on art and antiquity are among the most valuable portions of his diary. Study and gardening were his chief occupations under the Commonwealth, varied with some cautious intriguing on behalf of the exiled king. Under the Restoration he was in great favour, and, although taking no part in politics,

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