ANTIQUITY AND POSTERITY. Past and to come seem best; things present worst. I INTENDED to have addressed this essay to Posterity, but I recollected the sarcasm levelled against the French author who dedicated an ode to the same personage that it would never reach its destination; besides, I may inquire with the Irishman, "What has Posterity ever done for us?" and why should we throw away good advice, which will probably be unheard by the party for whom it was intended, and will be certainly unmerited? As to Antiquity-the stream of time is the only one that cannot be navigated both ways; there is no steam-boat that can work against wind and tide, and carry a passenger or a letter back to the fountain-head of events, or even to the last landmark that we passed in our voyage to the great ocean of Eternity. To say the truth, I have no respect whatever for that solemn bugbear, that shadowy quack, yclept Antiquity, whom I have always contemplated as a very grave impostor and reverend humbug (begging pardon for such a conjunction of phrases): and as to the good old times, of which every body talks so much and knows so little, which, like the horizon, keep flying farther backward as we attempt to approach them, I suspect that if we could once pounce upon them and subject them to our inspection, we should find them to be the very worst times possible. The golden age is as much a fable as the golden fleece, or, if reducible to some rude elements of truth, they would not be much more magnificent than the celebrated Argonautic prize, which, divested of its poetical embellishments, was nothing more than an old sheepskin stretched across the river Phasis, to catch the particles of ore rolled down by its waters. This cant is regularly transmitted from generation to generation, and may be traced back to the revival of literature; * so that if there be any truth in the tradition, this past millennium must have flourished in the dark ages, and have expired without leaving a record of its existence. It is flattering to human pride to indulge in reveries of former happiness and perfection, because they infer a probability of their future recurrence; hence it is, that, not content with assigning a higher moral stature to our ancestors, we cling to the belief of their gigantic bodily proportions, despite of the evidence of history, of skeletons, and of Egyptians embalmed many centuries before our æra, who must have been a very diminu 66 Horace bewailed the human declension of his time, and, prophesying its continuance, anticipated that his contemporaries were mox daturos progeniem vitiosiorem." The learned Poggio, who was so instrumental in the revival of letters, noticing the prevalence of the same conceit in his days, says"Nature always preserves a certain degree of motion, and it is the same in human nature. To pretend that the world is perpetually getting worse, is a declamation unsupported by any historical examination of different ages." tive race, unless they have shrunk terribly in the pickling. The Bacon has exposed this egregious mistake, which, by confounding the world's duration with the successions of men, induces us to call those the old times in which the oldest writers and legislators flourished, and leads us by analogy to attribute to the world's infancy and inexperience that reverence which we properly feel for the wisdom of individual age. times in which we live are in reality the oldest; and if mere antiquity deserve our homage, let us pay it to the existing generation, for we are the real Simon Pures, and the ancients were but the sucklings and children of the world's growth. If wisdom were occasionally ordained out of their mouths, we possess it superadded to our own, with all the experience of the intervening ages. They were the raw youngsters, and we are the true Nestors. We show deference to the matured sagacity of the man, not to the crude attempts of the schoolboy: why, then, are we to reverence those collections of men, who, in the pupilage of time, were deemed miracles of precocity if they advanced beyond their A B C ? All our impressions upon this subject are but so many mischievous prejudices, which, if we could reduce them to action, would compel the moral world to go backward instead of forward; and we must totally reverse the usual operation of our minds, if we would render proper justice to ourselves and to Antiquity. Nothing can be more ephemeral than our individual existence; but we are the constituents of 66 an immortal community-the deciduous leaves of an imperishable trunk; for though generations pass away, the British public is perennial. We are the identical gentlemen to whom our ancestors have made so many pathetic appeals and apostrophes under the name of Posterity; and we are, moreover, the worshipful personages destined to be hereafter revered, and regretted, and eulogized, under the respectable designation of our wise Ancestors." Let us, then, hold up our heads, for we stand between two mighty congregations, the past and the future, and our measure remains to be fairly taken. Whatever we contribute to the general stock of wisdom, we shall bequeath in addition to that which we have inherited; and if we are disposed to pride ourselves on the possession of a greater store than was enjoyed by our ancestors, we may learn humility from reflecting, that our successors will in the same proportion be still richer than ourselves. We have only, therefore, to assign to Posterity that gravity, and experience, and wisdom, which we ignorantly impute to the raw, boyish simpleton-Antiquity, and the two candidates for our favour will receive the fair award of their respective merits. But I have a terrible crow to pick with this latter personage, Signor Antiquity, as a mighty stalkinghorse on which knaves and bigots invariably mount, when they want to ride over the timid and the credulous. We never hear so much palaver about the timehallowed institutions and approved wisdom of our Ancestors, as when attempts are made to remove some staring monument of their folly. Sir Matthew Hale, that great luminary of law, after having condemned a poor woman to death for witchcraft, took occasion to sneer at the rash innovators who were then advocating a repeal of that statute; and falling on his knees, thanked God for being enabled to uphold one of the sagest enactments handed down to us by our venerable forefathers. Bacon, who was so far beyond his age in all matters of science, was not less credulous than the weakest of his contemporaries, and published very minute directions for guarding against witches, under which imputation many scores of wretched old women were burnt in the reign of that sapient Demonologist, James the First. The worthy Druids, who sacrificed human victims to their idols, were "our illustrious Ancestors;" and if required to select instances from more modern and civilized times, I would point to those of "our enlightened forefathers," who wasted their lives and fortunes in seeking the Elixir Vitæ and Philosopher's Stone-who practised torture upon suspected criminals who believed in the efficacy of the King's touch for curing the Evil, and transmitted to us many other practices of barbarism and ignorance, which have become happily exploded, though not without great difficulty and opposition. Nay, have not we ourselves, who are fated to be the sage and revered progenitors of future canters, seen a French and Spanish army fighting for the restoration of the Inquisition and despotism? Have we not in our own country witnessed the existence of the Slave Trade, and heard the denunciations of its supporters against those who would subvert" the glorious institutions handed down VOL. 11. |