CHAPTER XLI. THE CLOSE OF THE REIGN. In the early days of the year 1753 literature and philosophy lost a great man by the death of Bishop Berkeley. George Berkeley was born on March 12, 1684, by the Nore, in the county Kilkenny. His father was an Irishman of English descent, William Berkeley. In the first year of the eighteenth century George Berkeley went, a lad of fifteen, to the University of Dublin, to Trinity College. In Trinity College he remained for thirteen years, studying, thinking, dreaming, bewildering most of the collegians, his colleagues, who seem to have been unable to make up their minds whether he was a genius or a blockhead. Within the walls of Trinity he worked, gradually and laboriously piecing together and thoughtfully shaping out his theory of the metaphysical conception of the material world about him; poring over Locke and Plato, breathing an atmosphere saturated with Cartesianism, his active mind eagerly investigating, exploring, inquiring in all directions, and his hand recording day by day the notes and stages of his mental development. 1684-1753. BERKELEY. 389 His early philosophical writings rapidly earned him a reputation in the great world of London, to which at that time the eyes of all men-divines, wits, statesmen, philosophers, and poets-turned. It is not necessary here to dwell upon the nature of those philosophical writings, or to enter into any study of the great theory of idealism in which he affirmed that there is no proof of the existence of matter anywhere save in our own perceptions. Byron, in his light-hearted way, more than two generations later, dismissed Bishop Berkeley and his theory in the famous couplet When Bishop Berkeley said 'there was no matter,' -a smart saying which Byron did not intend to put forth, and which nobody would be likely to regard, as a serious summing up of the mental work of Berkeley. Berkeley came to London in the first winter month of 1713, and made the acquaintance of his great countryman Swift. The Dean was a great patron of Berkeley's in those early London days. Swift took Berkeley to Court, and introduced him or spoke of him to all the great Ministers, and pushed his fortunes by all the ways-and they were manyin his power. Berkeley, with the aid of Swift, was soon made free of that wonderful republic of letters which then held sway in London, and which numbered amongst its members such men as Steele and Addison, Bolingbroke and Harley, Gay and Arbuthnot, and Pope. Berkeley was in Addison's box at the first performance of 'Cato,' and tasted of the author's champagne and burgundy there, and listened with curious delight to the mingled applause and hisses that greeted Mr. Pope's prologue. A little later Berkeley went to Italy as the travelling tutor, the bear-leader, of the son of Ashe, Bishop of Clogher. In Italy he passed some four enchanted years. Berkeley came back to England in 1720 to find all England writhing in the welter and chaos of the South-Sea crash. The shame and misery of the time appear to have inspired him with a kind of horror of the hollow civilisation of the age, and to have given him his first promptings towards that ideal community in the remote Atlantic to which his mind turned so strongly a little later. He left England speedily, and came home again to Ireland after an absence of eight years. It was in Ireland that a strange windfall came to him and amazed him. On that fatal afternoon when Swift, with a legion of wild passions tearing at his heart-strings, rode over to Marley Abbey to fling back at Vanessa's feet the letter she had written to Stella, Hester Vanhomrigh received her death-blow. But she lived long enough to inflict a curious little piece of vengeance, the only vengeance in her power, except the nobler revenge of forgiveness, upon the false Cadenus. She had left by will all the property she possessed to the man she had so madly worshipped. With the hand of death upon her, with the raging eyes of the Dean still burning upon her brain, she performed the one little pitiful act of retaliation which 1720. 'THE STILL-VEXED BERMOOTHES.' 391 is the saddest spot in all her sad history; she altered her will, and disinherited her idol. For the name of Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, she substituted the name of another great Irishman, another great Churchman, another great thinker and teacher, the name of George Berkeley, Dean-only nominally so, indeed—of Dromore. Berkeley's first idea on receiving this unexpected windfall was to employ the money thus almost miraculously placed at his disposal in carrying out a scheme which had long been dear to his heart. This scheme was that he should emigrate to Bermuda, should settle there, and devote the rest of his life to the reformation of manners among the English in our Western plantations, and the propagation of the Gospel among the American savages.' He was nobly convinced of the nobility of his dream, and, which was more remarkable, he succeeded in awaking a latent nobility in unexpected places, and in arousing an enthusiasm for this dream of a Bermudan Utopia even in callous hearts and unsympathetic bosoms. Bermuda became for a while the fashion in the marvellous medley of London society over which the first of the Georges reigned. People talked Bermuda, thought Bermuda, wrote Bermuda. He was indeed. a remarkable man whose missionary zeal and eloquence could make Bermuda popular in London with the voice of religion. He was indeed a remarkable man who could impress for a moment the cynical nature of Bolingbroke with something of the fire of his own enthusiasm ; who could induce Walpole to swell from his own pocket the subscription-list that was raised to further Berkeley's schemes; who actually succeeded in touching the callous organism which the Elector of Hanover and King of England called a heart; and whose one joy on hearing of the Vanessa legacy was at the aid it afforded to his voyage and his pure, unselfish aspirations. Bermuda ever remained a vision for him; but in 1728 he set sail for Rhode Island in the company of his young wife, Miss Anne Forster, whom, as he quaintly tells us, he chose 'for her qualities of mind and her unaffected inclination to books.' For more than three years he dwelt in America a simple, happy, earnest life. But the mission was a failure. To Robert Walpole Berkeley's plans and hopes would naturally seem about as deserving of the attention and aid of practical men as the ambitions of Don Quixote. The grant promised by the Government was never sent out, and in 1731 Berkeley came back to England. How many of those who are familiar with the line, 'Westward the course of empire takes its way,' which has been accepted as the motto for one of the best and best-known frescoes that adorn the Capitol in Washington, know that it comes from the last verse of a poem which Berkeley wrote as he was striving to realise a New Atlantis in Rhode Island ? Westward the course of empire takes its way; The first four acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Two years of literary and philosophic life in London |