ESSAY IX. Great men have liv'd among us, heads that plann'd In the preceding essay I have explained the good, that is, the natural consequences of the promulgation to all of truths which all are bound to know and to make known. The evils occasioned by it, with few and rare exceptions, have their origin in the attempts to suppress or pervertit; in the fury and violence of imposture attacked or undermined in her strong holds, or in the extravagances of ignorance and credulity roused from their lethargy, and angry at the medicinal disturbance-awaking, not yet broad awake, and thus blending the monsters of uneasy dreams with the real objects, on which the drowsy eye had alternately half-opened and closed, again half-opened and again closed. This re-action of deceit and superstition, with all the trouble and tumult incident, I would compare to a fire which bursts forth from some stifled and fermenting mass on the first admission of light and air. It roars and blazes, and converts the already spoilt or damaged stuff with all the straw and straw-like matter near it, first into flame and the next moment into ashes. The fire dies away, the ashes are scattered on all the winds, and what began in worthlessness ends in nothingness. Such are the evil, that is, the casual consequences of the same promulgation. It argues a narrow or corrupt nature to lose sight of the general and lasting consequences of rare and virtuous energy, in the brief accidents, which accompanied its first movements-to set lightly by the emancipation of the human reason from a legion of devils, in our complaints and lamentations over the loss of a herd of swine! The Cranmers, Hampdens, and Sidneys, -the counsellors of our Elizabeth, and the friends of our other great deliverer, the third William, is it in vain, that these have been our countrymen? Are we not the heirs of their good deeds? And what are noble deeds but noble truths realized? As Protestants, as Englishmen, as the inheritors of so ample an estate of might and right, an estate so strongly fenced, so richly planted, by the sinewy arms and dauntless hearts of our forefathers, we of all others have good cause to trust in the truth, yea, to follow its pillar of fire through the darkness and the desart, even though its light should but suffice to make us certain of its own presence. If there be elsewhere men jealous of the light, who prophesy an excess of evil over good from its manifestation, we are entitled to ask them, on what experience they ground their bodings? Our own country bears no traces, our own history contains no records, to justify them. From the great æras of national illumination we date the commencement of our main national advantages. The tangle of delusions, which stifled and distorted the growing tree, have been torn away; the parasite weeds, that fed on its very roots, have been plucked up with a salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant care, the gradual improvement, the cautious, unhazardous, labours of the industrious though contented gardener-to prune, to engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the slug and the caterpillar. But far be it from us to undervalue with light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence, to which the blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext. That the very terms, with which the bigot or the hireling would blacken the first publishers of political and religious truth, are, and deserve to be, hateful to us, we owe to the effects of its publication. We ante-date the feelings in order to criminate the authors of our tranquillity, opulence, and security. But let us be aware. Effects will not, indeed, immediately disappear with their causes; but neither can they long continue without them. If by the reception of truth in the spirit of truth, we became what we are; only by the retention of it in the same spirit, can we remain what we are. The narrow seas that form our boundaries, what were they in times of old? The convenient highway for Danish and Norman pirates. What are they now? Still but ' a span of waters.' Yet they roll at the base of the inisled Ararat, on which the ark of the hope of Europe and of civilization rested! Even so doth God protect us, if we be WORDSWORTH. ESSAY X. I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the church and commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth: and being sown up and down may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burthen to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. MILTON'S Speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing. THUS far then I have been conducting a cause between an individual and his own mind. Proceeding on the conviction, that to man is entrusted the nature, not the result, of his actions, I have pre |