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make but flies of men, and wildernesses of whole nations. Swell not into vehement actions, which embroil and confound the earth, but be one of those violent ones that force the kingdom of heaven.* If thou must needs rule, be Zeno's king, and enjoy that empire which every man gives himself: certainly the iterated injunctions of Christ unto humility, meekness, patience, and that despised train of virtues, cannot but make pathetical impression upon those who have well considered the affairs of all ages; wherein pride, ambition, and vain-glory have led up to the worst of actions, whereunto confusions, tragedies, and acts, denying all religion, do owe their originals.

Rest not in an ovation, but a triumph over thy passions. Chain up the unruly legion of thy breast; behold thy trophies within thee, not without thee. Lead thine own captivity captive, and be Cæsar unto thyself.

Give no quarter unto those vices that are of thine inward family, and, having a root in thy temper, plead a right and propriety in thee. Examine well thy complexional inclinations. Rain early batteries against those strongholds built upon the rock of nature, and make this a great part of the militia of thy life. The politic

nature of vice must be opposed by policy, and therefore wiser honesties project and plot against sin; wherein notwithstanding we are not to rest in generals, or the trite stratagems of art; that may succeed with one temper, which may prove successless with another. There is no community or commonwealth of virtue, every man must study his own economy, and erect these rules unto the figure of himself.

Lastly, if length of days be thy portion, make it not thy expectation. Reckon not upon long life; but live always beyond thy account. He that so often surviveth his expectation lives many lives, and will scarce complain of the shortness of his days. Time past is gone like a shadow; make times to come present; conceive that near which may be far off. Approximate thy latter times by present apprehensions of them: be like a neighbour unto death, and think there is but little to come. And since there is something in us that must still live on, join both lives together, unite them in thy thoughts and actions, and live in one but for the other. He who thus ordereth the purposes of this life, will never be far from the next, and is in some manner already in it, by a happy conformity and close apprehension of it.

SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE.

BORN 1628: DIED 1698.

(From "Miscellanea," first and second parts.)

AGAINST EXCESSIVE GRIEF.+ THE honour I received by a letter from your ladyship, was too great and too sensible not to be acknowledged; but yet I doubted whether that occasion could bear me out in the confidence of giving your ladyship any further troubles of this kind, without as good an errand as my last. This I have reckoned upon a good while by another visit my sister and I had designed to my Lord Capell. How we came to have deferred it so long, I think we are neither of us like to tell you at this distance, though we make ourselves believe it could not be helped. Your ladyship at least has had the advantage of being thereby excused some time from this trouble, which I could no longer forbear, upon the sensible wounds that have so often of late been given your friends here by such desperate expressions in several of your letters concerning your humour, your health, and your life; in all which, if they

* Matt. xi.

are your friends, you must allow them to be extremely concerned. Perhaps none can be at heart more partial than I am to whatever touches your ladyship, nor more inclined to defend you upon this very occasion, how unjust and unkind soever you are to yourself. But when you go about to throw away your health, or your life, so great a remainder of your own family, and so great hopes of that into which you are entered, and all by a desperate melancholy, upon an accident past remedy, and to which all mortal race is perpetually subject. For God's sake, madam, give me leave to tell you, that what you do is not at all agreeable either with so good a Christian, or so reasonable and so great a person as your ladyship appears to the world in all other lights.

I know no duty in religion more generally agreed on, nor more justly required by God Almighty, than a perfect submission to His will in all things; nor do I think any disposition of mind can either please Him more, or become us

† Addressed to the Countess of Essex, January 29, better, than that of being satisfied with all He 1674, on the death of her only daughter.

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gives, and contented with all He takes away.

None I am sure can be of more honour to God, nor of more ease to ourselves: for if we consider Him as our Maker, we cannot contend with Him; if as our Father, we ought not to distrust Him; so that we may be confident, whatever He does is intended for our good, and whatever happens that we interpret otherwise, yet we can get nothing by repining, nor save anything by resisting.

But if it were fit for us to reason with God Almighty, and your ladyship's loss be acknowledged as great as it could have been to any one alive; yet I doubt, you would have but ill grace to complain at the rate you have done, or rather as you do for the first motions or passions, how violent soever, may be pardoned; and it is only the course of them which makes them inexcusable. In this world, madam, there is nothing perfectly good, and whatever is called so, is but either comparatively with other things of its kind, or else with the evil that is mingled in its composition; so he is a good man that is better than men commonly are, or in whom the good qualities are more than the bad: so in the course of life, his condition is esteemed good, which is better than that of most other men, or wherein the good circumstances are more than the ill. By this measure, I doubt, madam, your complaints ought to be turned into acknowledgments, and your friends would have cause to rejoice rather than condole with you; for the goods or blessings of life are usually esteemed to be birth, health, beauty, friends, children, honour, riches. Now when your ladyship has fairly considered how God Almighty has dealt with you in what He has given you of all these, you may be left to judge yourself how you have dealt with Him in your complaints for what He has taken away. But if you look about you, and consider other lives as well as your own, and what your lot is in comparison with those that have been drawn in the circle of your knowledge; if you think how few are born with honour, how many die without name or children, how little beauty we see, how few friends we hear of, how many diseases, and how much poverty there is in the world, you will fall down upon your knees, and instead of repining at one affliction, will admire so many blessings as you have received at the hand of God.

To put your ladyship in mind of what you are, and the advantages you have in all these points, would look like a design to flatter you: but this I may say, that we will pity you as much as you please, if you will tell us who they are that you think upon all circumstances you have reason to envy. Now if I had a master that gave me all I could ask, but thought fit to take one thing from me again, either because I used it ill, or gave myself so much over to it, as to neglect what I owed either to him or the rest of the world; or perhaps because he would show his power, and put me in mind from whom I

held all the rest; would you think I had much reason to complain of hard usage, and never to remember any more what was left me, never to forget what was taken away?

It is true you have lost a child, and therein all that could be lost in a child of that age; but you have kept one child, and are likely to do so long; you have the assurance of another, and the hopes of many more. You have kept a husband great in employment, and in fortune, and (which is more) in the esteem of good men. You have kept your beauty and your health, unles you have destroyed them yourself, or discouraged them to stay with you by using them ill. You have friends that are as kind to you as you can wish or as you can give them leave to be by their fears of losing you, and being thereby so much the unhappier, the kinder they are to you. But you have honour and esteem from all that know you; or if ever it fails in any degree, it is only upon that point of your seeming to be fallen out with God and the whole world, and neither to care for yourself, or anything else, after what you have lost.

You will say perhaps that one thing was all to you, and your fondness of it made you indifferent to everything else. But this, I doubt, will be so far from justifying you, that it will prove to be your fault as well as your misfortune. God Almighty gave you all the blessings of life, and you set your heart wholly upon one, and despise or undervalue all the rest; is this His fault or yours? Nay, is it not to be very unthankful to Heaven, as well as very scornful to the rest of the world; is it not to say, because you have lost one thing God hath given you, you thank Him for nothing He has left, and care not what He takes away? Is it not to say, since that one thing is gone out of the world, there is nothing left in it which you think can deserve your kindness or esteem? A friend makes me a feast, and sets all before me that his care or kindness could provide; but I set my heart upon one dish alone, and if that happen to be thrown down, I scorn all the rest; and though he sends for another of the same, yet I rise from the table in a rage, and say my friend is my enemy, and has done me the greatest wrong in the world; have I reason, madam, or good grace in what I do? Or would it become me better to eat of the rest that is before me, and think no more of what had happened, and could not be remedied?

All the precepts of Christianity agree to teach and command us to moderate our passions, to temper our affections towards all things below; to be thankful for the possession, and patient under the loss whenever He that gave it shall see fit to take away. Your extreme fondness was perhaps as displeasing to God before, as now your extreme affliction; and your loss may have been a punishment for your faults in the manner of enjoying what you had. It is at least pious

to ascribe all the ill that befalls us to our own demerits rather than to injustice in God; and becomes us better to adore all the issues of His providence in the effects, than inquire into the causes. For submission is the only way of reasoning between a creature and its Maker; and contentment in His will is the greatest duty we can pretend to, and the best remedy we can apply to all our misfortunes.

But, madam, though religion were no party in your case, and that for so violent and injurious a grief you had nothing to answer to God, but only to the world and yourself; yet I very much doubt how you would be acquitted. We bring into the world with us a poor, needy, uncertain life, short at the longest, and unquiet at the best; all the imaginations of the witty and the wise have been perpetually busied to find out the ways how to revive it with pleasures, or relieve it with diversions; how to compose it with ease, and settle it with safety. To some of these ends have been employed the institutions of lawgivers, the reasonings of philosophers, the inventions of poets, the pains of labouring, and the extravagances of voluptuous men. All the world is perpetually at work about nothing else, but only that our poor mortal lives should pass the easier and happier for that little time we possess them, or else end the better when we lose them. Upon this occasion riches came to be coveted, honours to be esteemed, friendship and love to be pursued, and virtues themselves to be admired in the world. Now, madam, is it not to bid defiance to all mankind, to condemn their universal opinions and designs, if instead of passing your life as well and easily, you resolve to pass it as ill and as miserably as you can? You grow insensible to the conveniences of riches, the delights of honour and praise, the charms of kindness or friendship, nay, to the observance or applause of virtues themselves; for who can you expect, in these excesses of passions, will allow you to show either temperance or fortitude, to be either prudent or just? And for your friends, I suppose, you reckon upon losing their kindness, when you have sufficiently convinced them, they can never hope for any of yours, since you have none left for yourself or anything else. You declare upon all occasions, you are incapable of receiving any comfort or pleasure in anything that is left in this world; and I assure you, madam, none can ever love you, that can have no hopes ever to please you.

Among the several inquiries and endeavours after the happiness of life, the sensual men agree in pursuit of every pleasure they can start, without regarding the pains of the chase, the weariness when it ends, or how little the quarry is worth. The busy and ambitious fall into the more lasting pursuits of power and riches; the speculative men prefer tranquillity of mind, before the different motions of passion and

appetite, or the common successions of desire and satiety, of pleasure and pain: but this may seem too dull a principle for the happiness of life, which is ever in motion: and passions are perhaps the stings, without which they say no honey is made; yet I think all sorts of men have ever agreed, they ought to be our servants, and not our masters; to give us some agitation for entertainment or exercise, but never to throw our reason out of its seat. Perhaps I would not always sit still, or would be sometimes on horseback; but I would never ride a horse that galls my flesh, or shakes my bones, or that runs away with me as he pleases, so as I can neither stop at a river or precipice. Better no passions at all, than have them too violent; or such alone, as instead of heightening our pleasures, afford us nothing but vexation and pain.

In all such losses as your ladyship's has been, there is something that common nature cannot be denied, there is a great deal that good-nature may be allowed; but all excessive and outrageous grief or lamentation for the dead, was accounted among the ancient Christians, to have something of heathenish; and among the civil nations of old, to have something of barbarous; and therefore it has been the care of the first to moderate it by their precepts, and the latter to restrain it by their law. The longest time that has been allowed to the forms of mourning by the custom of any country, and in any relation, has been but that of a year, in which space the body is commonly supposed to be mouldered away to earth, and to retain no more figure of what it was; but this has been given only to the loss of parents, of husband, or wife. On the other side, to children under age, nothing has been allowed; and I suppose with particular reason (the common ground of all general customs), perhaps because they die in innocence, and without having tasted the miseries of life, so as we are sure they are well when they leave us, and escape much ill that would in all appearance have befallen them if they had stayed longer with us. Besides, a parent may have twenty children, and so his mourning may run through all the best of his life, if his losses are frequent of that kind; and our kindness to children so young, is taken to proceed from common opinions, or fond imaginations, not friendship or esteem; and to be grounded upon entertainment, rather than use in the many offices of life: nor would it pass from any person besides your ladyship, to say you lost a companion and a friend at nine years old, though you lost one indeed, who gave the fairest hopes that could be of being both in time, and everything else that was estimable and good. But yet, that itself God only knows, considering the changes of humour and disposition, which are as great as those of feature, and shape the first sixteen years of our lives, considering the chances of time, the infection of company,

the snares of the world, and the passions of youth, so that the most excellent and agreeable creature of that tender age, and that seemed born under the happiest stars, might by the course of years and accidents, come to be the most miserable herself, and more trouble to her friends by living long, than she could have been by dying

young.

Yet after all, madam, I think your loss so great, and some measure of your grief so deserved, that would all your passionate complaints, all the anguish of your heart do anything to retrieve it; could tears water the lovely plant, so as to make it grow again after once it is cut down; would sighs furnish new breath, or could it draw life and spirits from the wasting of yours -I am sure your friends would be so far from accusing your passion, that they would encourage it as much, and share it as deep as they could. But, alas! the eternal laws of the creation extinguish all such hopes, forbid all such designs; nature gives us many children and friends to take them away, but takes none away to give them us again. And this makes the excesses of grief to have been so universally condemned, as a thing unnatural, because so much in vain, whereas nature, they say, does nothing in vain; as a thing so unreasonable, because so contrary to our own designs; for we all design to be well and at ease, and by grief we make ourselves ill of imaginary wounds, and raise ourselves troubles most properly out of the dust, whilst our ravings and complaints are but like arrows shot up into the air, at no mark, and so to no purpose, but only to fall back upon our heads, and destroy ourselves, instead of recovering or revenging our friends.

Perhaps, madam, you will say this is your design, or if not, your desire; but I hope you are not yet so far gone, or so desperately bent. Your ladyship knows very well your life is not your own, but His that lent it to you to manage and preserve the best you could, and not to throw it away as if it came from some common hand. It belongs in a great measure to your country and your family; and therefore, by all human laws, as well as Divine, self-murder has ever been agreed on as the greatest crime, and is punished here with the utmost shame, which is all that can be inflicted upon the dead. But is the crime much less to kill ourselves by a slow poison than by a sudden wound? Now, if we do it, and know we do it, by a long and a continual grief, can we think ourselves innocent? What great difference is there if we break our hearts or consume them; if we pierce them, or bruise them; since all determines in the same death, as all arises from the same despair? But what if it goes not so far? It is not, indeed, so bad as might be, but that does not excuse it from being very ill. Though I do not kill my neighbour, is it no hurt to wound him, or to spoil him of the conveniences of life? The greatest crime is for a

man to kill himself; is it a small one to wound himself by anguish of heart, by grief, or despair, to ruin his health, to shorten his age, to deprive himself of all the pleasures, or eases, or enjoyments of life?

Next to the mischiefs we do ourselves are those we do our children and our friends, as those who deserve best of us, or at least deserve no ill. The child you carry about you, what has that done that you should endeavour to deprive it of life almost as soon as you bestow it; or if, at the best, you suffer it to live to be born, yet by your ill usage of yourself, should so much impair the strength of its body and health, and perhaps the very temper of its mind, by giving it such an infusion of melancholy, as may serve to discolour the objects and disrelish the accidents it may meet with in the common train of life? But this is one you are not yet acquainted with. What will you say to another you are? Were it a small injury to my Lord Capell, to deprive him of a mother, from whose prudence and kindness he may justly expect the cares of his health and education, the forming of his body, and the cultivating of his mind; the seeds of honour and virtue, and thereby the true principles of a happy life. How has my Lord of Essex deserved that you should go about to lose him a wife he loves with so much passion, and, which is more, with so much reason; so great an honour and support to his family, so great a hope to his fortune, and comfort to his life? Are there so many left of your own great family that you should desire in a manner wholly to reduce it by suffering the greatest and almost last branch of it to wither away before its time? or is your country in this age so stored with great persons that you should envy it those we may justly expect from so noble a race?

Whilst I had any hopes your tears would ease you, or that your grief would consume itself by liberty and tine, your ladyship knows very well I never once accused it, nor ever increased it, like many others, by the common formal ways of assuaging it, and this, I am sure, is the first office of this kind I ever went about to perform otherwise than in the most ordinary forms. I was in the hope what was so violent could not be so long; but when I observed it to grow stronger with age, and increase like a stream the farther it ran; when I saw it draw out to so many unhappy consequences, and threaten no less than your child, your health, and your life, I could no longer forbear this endeavour, nor end it without begging of your ladyship, for God's sake and for your own, for your children's and your friends', for your country's and your family's, that you would no longer abandon yourself to so disconsolate a passion, but that you would at length awaken your piety, give way to your prudence, or at least rouse up the invincible spirit of the Percies, that never yet shrank at any disaster; that you would some.

times remember the great honours and fortunes of your family, not always the losses; cherish those veins of good humour that are sometimes so natural to you, and sear up those of ill that would make you so unnatural to your children and to yourself. But above all, that you would enter upon the cares of your health and your life, for your friends' sake at least, if not for your

own.

OF POETRY.

The two common shrines to which most men offer up the application of their thoughts and their lives, are profit and pleasure; and by their devotions to either of these they are vulgarly distinguished into two sects, and called either busy or idle men. Whether these terms differ in meaning, or only in sound, I know very well may be disputed, and with appearance enough, since the covetous man takes perhaps as much pleasure in his gains as the voluptuous does in his luxury, and would not pursue his business unless he were pleased with it, upon the last account of what he most wishes and desires, nor would care for the increase of his fortunes, unless he proposed thereby, that of his pleasures too, in ore kind or other, so that pleasure may be said to be his end, whether he will allow to find it in his pursuit or no. Much ado there has been, many words spent, or (to speak with more respect to the ancient philosophers) many disputes have been raised upon this argument, I think to little purpose, and that all has been rather an exercise of wit than an inquiry after truth; and all controversies that can never end, had better, perhaps, never begin. The best is to take words as they are most commonly spoken and meant, like coin as it most currently passes, without raising scruples upon the weight of the alloy, unless the cheat or the defect be gross and evident. Few things in the world, or none, will bear too much refining; a thread too fine spun will easily break, and the point of a needle too finely filed. The usual acceptation takes profit and pleasure for two different things, and not only calls the followers or votaries of them by several names of busy and of idle men, but distinguishes the faculties of the mind that are conversant about them, calling the operations of the first wisdom, and of the other wit, which is a Saxon word that is used to express what the Spaniards and Italians call ingenio, and the French esprit, both from the Latin; but I think wit more peculiarly signifies that of poetry, as may occur upon remarks of the Runic language. To the first of these are attributed the inventions or productions of things generally esteemed the most necessary, useful, or profitable to human life, either in private possessions or public institutions: to the other, those writings or discourses which are the most pleasing or entertaining to all that read or hear them; yet, according to the opinion of those

that link them together, as the inventions of sages and lawgivers themselves, do please as well as profit those who approve and follow them. So those of poets instruct and profit as well as please such as are conversant in them, and the happy mixture of both these, makes the excellency in both those compositions, and has given occasion for esteeming, or at least for calling heroic virtue and poetry, divine.

The names given to poets, both in Greek and Latin, express the same opinion of them in those nations; the Greek signifying makers or creators, such as raise admirable frames and fabrics out of nothing, which strike with wonder and with pleasure the eyes and imaginations of those who behold them; the Latin makes the same word common to poets and to prophets. Now, as creation is the first attribute and highest operation of Divine power, so is prophecy the greatest emanation of Divine Spirit in the world. As the names in those two learned languages, so the causes of poetry are, by the writers of them, to be divine, and to proceed from a celestial fire or Divine inspiration, and by the vulgar opinions recited or related to in many passages of those authors, the effects of poetry were likewise thought divine and supernatural, and power of charms and enchantments were ascribed to it.

"Carmina vel cœlo possunt deducere lunam, Carminibus Circe socios mutavit Ulyssis, Frigidus in pratis cantando rumpitur anguis." But I can easily admire poetry, and yet without adoring it; I can allow it to arise from the greatest excellency of natural temper, or the greatest race of native genius, without exceeding the reach of what is human, or giving it any approaches of divinity, which is, I doubt, debased or dishonoured by ascribing to it anything that is in the compass of our action, or even comprehension, unless it be raised by an immediate influence from itself. I cannot allow poetry to be more divine in its effects than in its causes, nor any operation produced by it, to be more than purely natural, or to deserve any other sort of wonder than those of music or of natural magic, however any of them have appeared to minds little versed in the speculations of nature, of occult qualities and the force of numbers, or of sounds. Whoever talks of drawing down the moon from heaven by force of verses or of charms, either believes not himself, or too easily believes what others told him, or perhaps follows an opinion begun by the practice of some poet upon the facility of some people, who, knowing the time when an eclipse would happen, told them he would by his charms call down the moon at such an hour, and was by them thought to have performed it.

When I read that charming description in Virgil's eighth eclogue of all sorts of charms and fascinations by verses, by images, by knots, by numbers, by fire, by herbs, employed upon

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