reign of the virgin queen was illustrated. Or
if we be more strongly attracted by the moral purity
and greatness, and that sanctity of civil and religious
duty, with which the tyranny of Charles I. was struggled
against, let us cast our eyes, in the hurry of admiration,
round that circle of glorious patriots: but do
not let us be persuaded, that each of these, in his
course of discipline, was uniformly helped forward
by those with whom he associated, or by those whose
care it was to direct him. Then, as now, existed
objects to which the wisest attached undue importance;
then, as now, judgment was misled by factions and
parties, time wasted in controversies fruitless, except
as far as they quickened the faculties; then, as now,
minds were venerated or idolized, which owed their
influence to the weakness of their contemporaries rather
than to their own power. Then, though great actions
were wrought, and great works in literature and science
produced, yet the general taste was capricious, fantastical,
or grovelling; and in this point, as in all others,
was youth subject to delusion, frequent in proportion
to the liveliness of the sensibility, and strong as
the strength of the imagination. Every age hath
abounded in instances of parents, kindred, and friends,
who, by indirect influence of example, or by positive
injunction and exhortation, have diverted or discouraged
the youth, who, in the simplicity and purity of nature,
had determined to follow his intellectual genius through
good and through evil, and had devoted himself to
knowledge, to the practice of virtue and the preservation
of integrity, in slight of temporal rewards.
Above all, have not the common duties and cares of
common life at all times exposed men to injury from
causes the action of which is the more fatal from being
silent and unremitting, and which, wherever it was
not jealously watched and steadily opposed, must have
pressed upon and consumed the diviner spirit?
There are two errors into which we easily slip when
thinking of past times. One lies in forgetting
in the excellence of what remains the large overbalance
of worthlessness that has been swept away. Ranging
over the wide tracts of antiquity, the situation of
the mind may be likened to that of a traveller[26]
in some unpeopled part of America, who is attracted
to the burial place of one of the primitive inhabitants.
It is conspicuous upon an eminence, ‘a mount
upon a mount!’ He digs into it, and finds that
it contains the bones of a man of mighty stature;
and he is tempted to give way to a belief, that as
there were giants in those days, so all men were giants.
But a second and wiser thought may suggest to him
that this tomb would never have forced itself upon
his notice, if it had not contained a body that was
distinguished from others,—that of a man
who had been selected as a chieftain or ruler for
the very reason that he surpassed the rest of his tribe
in stature, and who now lies thus conspicuously inhumed