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plant which is slow to bear." At times, | too little known "New Examen " furnish the difficulties and discouragements may us with various examples of similar shortdaunt the stoutest heart and the most liv- comings. ing faith. But God is greater than our hearts and wider than our thoughts, and if we are able to believe in him at all, we must also believe that the ultimate triumph of Christianity—and by Christian- abounding in reminiscences of George ity I mean not the comparatively narrow creed of this or that particular Church, but the divine spirit of its Founder, that spirit which, exactly in proportion as they are true to their name, informs, and animates, and underlies, and overlies them all is not problematical, but certain, and in his good time, across the lapse of ages, will prove to be, not local but universal, not partial but complete, not evanescent but eternal.

R. BOSWORTH SMITH.

From The National Review. LORD MACAULAY AND MADAME

D'ARBLAY.

The review of Madame D'Arblay's diaries and other writings is as vigorous and entertaining as anything he ever wrote. A lengthy notice of a work III. and Dr. Johnson, and composed by a lady in high favor with both those worthies, cannot but possess an abiding interest for the literary world. Let us hope that some of the interest thus excited may extend to the present attempted exposure of the spirit in which that review was written, and of the misconceptions into which its renowned author has been betrayed.

It was not against Madame D'Arblay herself that Macaulay's criticism of her writings was directed. Her journals were published posthumously, and he does not appear to have had much acquaintance with her. The true account of his paper in the Edinburgh Review on her works is to be found in the fact that his great opponent, John Wilson Croker, wrote a critique on them in the Quarterly Review soon after their publication. Macaulay's article, published in the next number of the Edinburgh Review, was evidently intended to counteract Croker's. So that we have here the literary warfare between the two rival critics going on with all its ardor, the batteries being masked, but the firing hot.

MACAULAY'S Essays must ever remain a standard work. His style is so clear, his presentation of facts so vivid, his arguments so cogent that the reader is at once captivated. Never doubting the correctness of his own opinions, never allow. ing that anything worthy of notice can be said on the other side, this most trenchant of writers supplies a periect instance in literature of Horace's saying that the self- We shall better understand the spirit in confident man is leader. His judgments which this essay was written if we first have the appearance of intuitions. His glance at the relation in which the two reasonings are like illustrations for his champions stood towards each other at readers' benefit. It seems impossible not the time of its publication. The origin of to sit down at the feet of so decided a their mutual enmity appears to have been teacher. One naturally accepts his ax- political, as it well may have been between ioms and finds his conclusions irresisti-him who invented the name of Conservable.

And on many subjects we may safely trust his guidance. He always appeals to our reason. He always seems master of his subject. Nevertheless, some serious flaws have been discovered in his accounts of public men. He has been shown, for instance, to have greatly misunderstood the relations between Warren Hastings and Sir Elijah Impey, and to have made an unfortunate confusion about the Quaker Penn. His estimate of Lord Bacon's judicial conduct has been proved to be beyond measure harsh and unfair. His theory of Boswell's abilities and character can have been accepted by few who have read Carlyle's paper on the subject; while the Quarterly Review and Paget's

tive for one party, and him who did more than any one else to affix the name of Liberal on the other. But it may suffice now to show what was the state of affairs between them as author and critic only.

A few years previously to the appearance of the two above-mentioned articles, Croker had issued an edition of Boswell's "Life of Johnson," with copious notes. Upon that work Macaulay pounced with merciless severity, inflicting on its author a castigation which must have been even more galling than that awarded by the same writer a year previously to Robert Montgomery. A host of misstatements, wrong dates, and childish bêtises are attributed to the editor, such as, if correctly alleged, no author's reputation could sur

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what startling. The brief account now given may serve to make it intelligible.

The Quarterly Reviewer had, some years previously, when noticing Madame D'Arblay's "Life of Dr. Burney," made known to the world his discovery that the authoress was twenty-five years of age when she published "Evelina." He had also alleged, perhaps on doubtful evidence, that she had given herself out as younger. And Croker had obtained proof of her real age, as he had surely a right to do. Without some such clue as the above history affords, it would be difficult to understand why one who ascertains the age at which an old lady had published her first work should for that reason be worse than a "savage," an "asp," or a "pole-cat."

Not thus, however, could Croker be crushed. To his next edition of Boswell he prefixed a preface in which many of Macaulay's allegations were extracted verbatim from the review, and answers to them were added in parallel columns. Nothing could be bolder or fairer than such a method of meeting the attack. And few things could be more amusing than a perusal of these two columns with a view to deciding between them. For example, Save for this strange outburst of private the critic falls foul of the editor for saying animosity, and for the reviewer's joining Lord Montrose was beheaded, whereas in the extravagant outcry against a "certhe schoolboy knows he was hanged. visial coctor's viduate dame" marrying a But he is met with the unexpected retort highly respectable Italian singer, all the that the marquis was hanged first and beheaded afterwards. Then again, the argu- | ments ably marshalled on either side of the question whether a certain " History of Prince Titi" was a fairy tale or a lampoon on Frederick, Prince of Wales, and the learned arguments adduced to show that by Theta Phi Johnson did or did not mean his departed friends, are so nicely balanced that the right conclusion from them is by no means certain even

now.

first part of the review is no less instructive than interesting. It is doubtless rather severe on Dr. Burney, who could scarcely be expected to perceive in a moment what a mine of wealth and talent he possessed in his supposed-dull daughter. But his satire on the doctor is really too good to be passed over.

Dr. Burney [he says] was an amiable man, a man of good abilities, a man who had seen much of the world. But he seems to have thought that going to court was like going to heaven; that to see princes and princesses was a kind of beatific vision; that the exquisite felicity enjoyed by such persons was not confined to themselves, but was communi

to all who were suffered to stand at their

It was at the height of this contest that first the earlier volumes of Madame D'Arblay's memoirs, and then a very damaging notice of them by Croker, ap-cated by some mysterious efflux or reflection peared. Instinctively and instantly Macaulay set to work at an elaborate review of the same book, apparently independent, but really intended to supersede and demolish that view of it which his rival had already put forth.

This criticism was published in January, 1843, within a year of the publication of the diary itself, an event which I, then a schoolboy fresh from "Boswell," but not yet a Wykehamist, well remember. The reviewer's animus is openly displayed in connection wth the first public event of the future Madame D'Arblay's life, viz., her baptism as Frances Burney. He is very irate because "a bad writer of our own time," Croker, to wit, "had searched the register of baptisms at Lynn," in order to ascertain the authoress's age. critic's abrupt manner of introducing the "worthless edition" of "Boswell," "some sheets of which" may have been " seen round parcels of better books," is some

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toilets or to bear their trains. He overruled all his daughter's objections, and himself escorted her to her prison . . . and he went on his way homeward, rejoicing at her marvellous prosperity.

The remainder of the article is chiefly occupied with Miss Burney's life at court, the first-published volumes not extending far beyond the date of her leaving Windsor. Without entering into particulars as to the two authors' treatment of the memoirs, I may say generally that Croker sets before us, with large quotations in support of it, a portrait of Miss Burney in the character of a vain, silly, and selfish young woman, very kindly treated, and very little benefited by kind treatment. Macaulay, on the other hand, sets himself to prove that her life was exceedingly hard, her treatment, except on the king's

Macaulay's Essays, vol. iii., p. 377

all the more saintly, all the less self-actly so far as European influence extends, regarding virtues, is tainted? Eliminate from Christendom all that the mother, the wife, the sister, and the daughter have done for it, and what would the residuum be like? The manly virtues, which are unquestionably inculcated by Islam, lose half their value, and more than half their beauty, when they are not set off and relieved by the gentler. How then can Christianity, however hopeless, at times, the struggle may appear, be expected to retire from it, and contentedly to acquiesce in the possession by Islam of so large | a portion of the earth, when Islam leaves half of all its votaries— the whole female sex, that is almost in the position in which it found them?

I now pass on to the second division of my subject, What Christianity has done, or may do, for Africa; and how, in view of the above facts and influences, she ought to regard the great kindred religion. And I shall be able to treat this part of the subject more briefly than I have done the first, partly, because much that I might be disposed to enlarge on, follows naturally from what I have already said, and partly, because I have discussed the whole subject fully, and in a spirit and with objects from which I have, as yet, seen no good reason to depart, in my lectures on Mohammed and Mohammedanism."

There is no disguising the fact that, hitherto, with the exception of one or two isolated spots, such as Abbeokuta and Kuruman, Christian effort has been any thing but markedly successful in Africa. No benefits comparable in extent or character to those which I have pointed out as the result of Mohammedanism have been, as yet, conferred on Africa by Christianity; and, on the other hand, the sufferings inflicted, at all events in past times, on this the most backward and the most heavily weighted, by geographical and other peculiarities, of all the great divisions of the world, by nations calling themselves Christian, bear only too close an analogy to those which have been, and still are, inflicted on them by Muslims. For many centuries, the maritime and commercial nations of Europe have torn away tens of thousands of Africans from their homes, with every circumstance of atrocity, and carried them off to a living death in the New World. The horrors of the "middle passage" and of the cotton plantation may well be set against those of the inland slave traffic in the hands of Muslims, and intemperance in the matter of intoxicating liquors, which extends ex

may be regarded as, at least, a partial setoff to the degradation of women, and to the sensuality which, too often, accompanies Mohammedanism. Christianity is in no sense to blame for this, but Christian nations are. If Christian philanthropy, in which England has taken the leading part, has, at last, succeeded in abolishing the oceanic slave-trade, it has only succeeded in undoing what Christian nations themselves began; and, as our sad experience in Ireland shows, it is easier far to remove abuses than to undo the impression which those abuses have created, and which has been burned into the souls of the sufferers. What wonder, as Mr. Blyden remarks, that no single African tribe as a tribe, and no leading African chief as a chief, has, as yet, been converted to Christianity on the west coast of Africa? Not that there has been any want of effort during the last hundred years. There is is hardly a nation or a denomination in Christendom which has not done its little something towards wiping out the stain. Protestant missionaries have vied with Catholic, Nonconformists of every type with Episcopalians, Americans with Swiss, and Scotchmen with Englishmen. In no country in the world has that "enthusiasm of humanity" which, whether it is acknowledged or not, is, except in rare and isolated cases, the result of Christianity and Christianity alone, manifested it self in nobler individual efforts for the good of the suffering and the degraded. Moffat and Livingstone and Krapf and Rebmann in the front rank of all, and Bishops Mackenzie, and Steere, and Hannington, in the second, are but the betterknown and more brilliant examples of a long succession of Christian philanthropists, who, filled with burning love to man and unfaltering faith in God, and flinging to the winds all considerations of wealth, and ease, and social position, and worldly honor, have left behind them house and home, and friends and country, and every. thing which is ordinarily supposed to make life worth having, if, haply, they might help forward into light some of the inhabitants of the dark continent.

Why, then, has Christianity failed? If we can discover the causes of the failure, then, as Lord Bacon is fond of pointing out, unless the causes are altogether intractable and irremovable, we have great "grounds of hope" for the future; and, on this subject, I would, once again, take the opportunity of begging every one who is interested in it, to study the first three

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essays of Mr. Blyden's volume. The first, "Mohammedanism and the Negro Race," is perhaps the most striking of the three, and the gem of the whole volume. I need do little more, in this part of my paper, than epitomize and reproduce, mutatis mutandis, some of his points.

First and foremost, then, Christianity has come to the negro- if I may use a phrase which is all too familiar to Englishmen at present, and with all too little reason -in a "foreign garb." Mohammedanism, though it had the sword to back it, first reached the negro when he was in his own country, when he was amidst his own surroundings, and when he was master of himself. It was not till it had acclimatized itself and taken root in the soil of Africa, that it was handed on to others, and then, no longer exclusively by Arab warriors or missionaries, but by men of the negro's own race, his own proclivities, his own color. It was a call to all who received it to come up higher, politically, socially, morally, religiously; to elevate themselves above their surroundings, and then, in turn, to elevate them. It was able to accommodate itself, as it has been able amongst other races who have embraced it- the Arabs, the Syrians, the Persians, the Afghans, the Hindus, the Malays, the East India Islanders, the Chinese, the Turks, the Turcomans, the Egyptians, and the Moors to many of the customs and peculiarities of the negro race. It thus, in time, became amalgamated with those customs, and passed on to fresh and ever-fresh tribes, with an ever-increasing momentum and prestige. Christianity, on the other hand, first reached the negro when he was a slave in a foreign land. It was, or appeared to be, the creed, not of his friends, his well-wishers, his kindred, but of his masters and his oppressors. His teachers differed from him in education, in manners, in color, in civilization. An immeasurable gap yawned between them. However humane his purpose, his Christian instructor evidently regarded him with something of that instinctive feeling of race repulsion which has been felt even by the warmest Abolitionists, and makes itself painfully evident wherever the black man comes in contact with the white. Thus, when the negro in America accepted Christianity, it chiefly that side of it which bids men look to a better world to right the wrongs and woes of this; and the practical duties most forcibly impressed upon him as some of the still existing catechisms quoted by Mr. Blyden show · were those of humil

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ity, of submission, of contentment with that not very desirable condition of life to which it was assumed that it had pleased God to call him. The other side of Christianity - the side which has produced the most active and noblest heroism, side by side with the saintly virtues, the heroism of Polycarp and the monk Telemachus, of St. Boniface and St. Bernard, of King Alfred and King Louis the Ninth, of Las Casas and St. Francis Xavier, of Gustavus Adolphus and Admiral Coligny, of Henry Martin and William Wilberforce, of Henry and John Lawrence, of General Gordon and Father Damien was almost a closed book to him.

Secondly, Christianity came to the negro, not as a development from within, but as a system from without. The white man's religion was a part of the white man's civilization which, as far as possible, was to be swallowed with it; and therefore it is, as Mr. Blyden points out, that everywhere in Christian lands the negro plays, at the present moment, the part of the slave, the ape, or the puppet. His efforts to conform to the canons of taste suggested indirectly by Christian art, as well as directly by Christian teaching, have undermined and destroyed his individuality and his self-respect, and made him the stunted, spiritless creature with which we are all familiar. Thus Mr. Blyden himself heard a negro at one of those prayer-meetings which form so large and so happy a part of the negro's life in the United States, pray to the Deity "to stretch out his lily white hands" to his worshippers while another, preaching on the words "We shall be like him," exclaimed, "Brethren, imagine a beautiful white man with blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and flaxen hair, and we shall be like him." If the idiosyncrasies of race are, as I believe them to be, the most precious heritage of man, and, therefore, deserve to be guarded with the tenderest and the most jealous care; if a lower development on the lines indicated by nature is more genuine, more real, more lasting than a higher development which is, at the time, altogether alien to them, then there is something radically wrong in the way in which Christianity has hitherto been presented to the negro in Christian lands.

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From the lessons he every day receives imbibes the conviction that, to be a good man, [says Mr. Blyden] the Negro unconsciously he must be like the white man. He is not brought up- however he may deserve it-to be the companion, the equal, the comrade of the white man, but his imitator and his para

site. To be himself in a country where every- | fatal hindrance to the spread of Christianthing ridicules him is to be nothing-less, ity is the lives of those who profess it, and worse than nothing. To be as like the white nowhere is this more the case - I think man as possible, to copy his outward appear- I might say, so much the case as on the ance, his peculiarities, his manners, the arcoast of Africa. rangement of his toilet, this is the aim of the

Christian Negro, his aspiration. The only

virtues which under the circumstances he ac

quires are the parasitical. Imitation is not discipleship. The Mohammedan Negro is a much better Mohammedan than the Christian Negro is a Christian, because the Muslim Negro as a learner is a disciple, not an imitator. A disciple, when freed from leading strings, may become a producer; an imitator never rises above a mere copyist. With the disciple progress is from within; the imitator grows by accretion from without. The learning required by a disciple gives him capacity; that gained by an imitator terminates in itself; the one becomes a capable man, the other is a mere sciolist. This explains the difference between the Mohammedan and the Christian Negro.

offered, chiefly, to the least promising of Fourthly, Christianity has, as yet, been the races of Africa, and that, too, under the least promising physical conditions. How is this? Almost all round Africa, and most markedly so along the coast of Guinea, there runs, for the breadth of from twenty to one hundred and fifty miles inland from the coast, a belt of ma larious country, consisting of low-lying plains and vast mangrove swamps, which are covered with masses of decaying vegetation. The climate is hot and moist, the sun beats fiercely down, and the foul fog which it draws up from the stagnant waters is charged with death. If it does not destroy life at once, at least, like opiumThirdly, Christianity has hitherto come eating, it slowly saps all the vital forces. to the negro weighted with the shortcom- The nobler beasts of burden themselves ings and the crimes of its professors. sicken and die in this pestilential atmoRum and gunpowder supplied, in un-sphere. No amount of care enables them limited quantities, to races in the condi- to live out their natural term. Woe to the tion of the west-African negro speak for European visitor who leaves his vessel themselves, and are a poor recommenda- and incautiously passes a night upon the tion for the efforts of Christian mission- shore! He, sometimes, falls a victim at aries. Selfishness, cruelty, and immorality have been the distinguishing marks of the European traders of all nations dealing with the west coast, and the alliances which we have been in the habit of contracting, for purposes of our own, with the weaker races on the sea-board with the Fantees, for instance- cutting off the more manly races of the interior, such as the Ashantees, from the natural outlet for their energies and commerce, have been a fertile source of those little wars which are anything but little in the hatreds which they engender, and the ill effects which they leave behind them. The Portuguese have occupied extensive settle ments along hundreds of miles of coast on each side of Africa, for more than three hundred years; and, during the whole of that time, they have not taken one single step to elevate the natives. As slavetraders, according to the explicit and repeated statements of Dr. Livingstone, they have shown themselves to be more heartless and more brutal than the Arabs themselves. Remove them from Africa to-morrow, and, with the exception of a few fine buildings, not one beneficent trace of their three hundred years of rule will they leave behind them. All the world over-in India, in China, in the South Sea Islands, in New Zealand—the most

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once, or, worse still, he carries about henceforward a sentence of death within himself. Sierra Leone itself has long been known as "the white man's grave. Those Europeans who manage, somehow or other, to acclimatize themselves, are generally the least favorable specimens of their race. It is not, as Mr. Blyden points out, the "fittest," but the "unfittest," who survive. The finer and more manly African races who live behind the coast ranges of mountains and within the central plateau, with its more moderate temperature and invigorating air, when they venture down to this fever-stricken region, themselves gradually degenerate, physi cally and morally, even as did the hardy Samnites of old, when they pressed down from their mountain fastnesses in the central Apennines to the luxurious shores of Campania. With noble self-devotion, but, it must be added, with strange shortsightedness, European missionaries have thrown themselves into this hopeless region, and, with rapidly enfeebling bodies and minds, have labored on among a people who are physically incapacitated, even if Christianized, for any vigorous exertion, till death released them. Not a single missionary settlement, except the few struggling stations along the pestilential lower Niger, has, I believe, yet been

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