LETTER V.

Effect of increasing Years on our Judgment of Poetry-Goldsmith's celebrated Lines on the slight Influence of Political Misrule on Private Happiness-Examination of his Doctrine on that subject.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

You know that I am a great reader of poetry, and have been a still greater. As I grow older, I find passion and sensibility giving way to intellect, the powers of feeling to those of discrimination; and now, instead of suffering myself to be borne passively along by the strain of the minstrel, I am perhaps too apt to stop and analyse its properties. In general, I find the logic of poets not very strict. Their object is to produce an effect, to make an impression; and they consequently accumulate every circumstance which can aid their purpose, and suppress every thing, however true, which would impair the unity or completeness of the emotion which it is their object to raise. To discriminate and weigh, would check the

imagination. Exceptions and limitations, so essential to truth, would be the destruction of sentiment. In this spirit of criticism, I happened lately to take up Goldsmith's Traveller, and I could not help being struck with the wrong impressions which the following passage, beautiful as it is in point of language, seems adapted to produce:—

"In every government, though terrors reign,
Though tyrant kings or tyrant laws restrain,
How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
Still to ourselves in every place consigned,

Our own felicity we make or find.

With secret course, which no loud storms annoy,
Glides the smooth current of domestic joy:
The lifted axe, the agonizing wheel,

Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel,

To men remote from power but rarely known,
Leave reason, faith, and conscience, all our own."

That all our happiness does not depend on governments, is too plain to be insisted upon; but that the evils inflicted by bad governments, or by tyrant kings or tyrant laws, form a small item in the sufferings of individuals, is a doctrine to which the friends of liberty cannot assent, without admitting that they are contending for their object with disproportionate

ardour. If a good and free government is valuable, it is valuable because it conduces to national happiness, and since national happiness is made up of the happiness of individuals, it must be valuable because it contributes to the felicity of private life. There is no abstract entity, called a nation, which endures calamity or enjoys good. It would therefore be a contradiction to assert, that there is much difference in value between a good and a bad government, and at the same time that the power which they possess of affecting human hearts with pain and pleasure is of little account. There are, it is true, a number of the evils of tyranny and oppression which appear to fall only on a few individuals, and not to affect those "remote from power." The capricious despot may in the course of his reign put to torture or to death only ten or twenty innocent victims, and when these are considered as part of a population of ten or twenty millions, the evil may appear too slight to be considered as materially trenching on general happiness. "Luke's iron crown and Damien's bed of steel" may fall to the lot of only one or two in an age. The power of a despotic government,

then, if we consider it only when it is exerted intentionally and specifically in extreme acts of tyranny against individuals, may not produce evils of much importance, at least in point of extent or frequency; but to regard the matter in this light, is to look upon a mere angle and not on the whole figure. It was such a confined and partial view which appears to have prompted these celebrated lines of the poet. Let us try for a moment what results will be afforded by a more comprehensive survey.

It is wrong, in the first place, to limit the evils of a tyrannical government to those individuals on whom its tyranny happens to light. Though the victims of its severity might be comparatively few, yet, as they would be selected by wantonness and caprice, or at least without regard to rule, there would be a continual dread and feeling of liability to evil through the whole community, constraining the words and actions of the people, and depriving them of that inestimable blessing, the sense of security in property, happiness, and life. And to live in perpetual alarm and constraint, to be incapable of acting with the fearlessness of

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innocence, to tremble at the unforeseen consequences of unavoidable casualties, lest they should be imputed as crimes-all this is surely to have the current of domestic joy deprived of some of its smoothness: all this is surely something more than insignificant for the heart to endure. A man's private felicity, besides, cannot be insulated from that of others; it is necessarily connected with the fate and fortunes of his neighbours. Independently of all dread of a similar catastrophe, the merciless imprisonment or execution of a fellow creature mingles bitterness in the feelings of every heart not callous to humanity.

But although the extreme acts of tyranny directed against individuals were few, the less important would be numerous. A despotic government infuses its spirit into all the ramifications of its power; into all its grand and petty officers; into the whole body of its minions; and the subject is oppressed in numerous ways, however remote he may be from power, and although he may be fortunate enough to escape "the lifted axe and agonizing wheel." There are a thousand species of op