C. MacLaurin

“ Material things hardly seemed to affect him; bestriding the world like a colossus he has given us a sublime instance of Intellect that for many years ruthlessly overmastered Circumstance. That Intellect was finally itself mastered by disease, leaving behind it a record which is of supreme interest to mankind; a record which, alas, is so disfigured by prejudice and falsehood that it is difficult to distinguish between what is true and what is untrue. Napoleon himself possessed so extraordinary a personality that nearly every one whom he met became a fervent adorer. ”

“ Nevertheless, Gibbon remains, and so far as we can see, will ever remain, the greatest of historians. Though we might not have had another Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, yet we might reasonably have looked for the completion of that autobiography which had such a brilliant beginning. What would we not give if that cool and appraising mind, which had raised Justinian and Belisarius from the dead and caused them to live again in the hearts of mankind, could have given its impressions of the momentous period in which it came to maturity? ”

“ Eleanor gave him a cordial to drink, and he resumed, saying that at last he had found the trials of Empire more than his health would allow him to sustain. He had decided to abdicate in favour of his beloved son Philip. It was given to few monarchs to die and yet to live—to see his own glory continued in the glory which he expected for his son. It seems to have been a really touching and dramatic scene, causing an immense sensation throughout Europe. If there were ever an indispensable man it would have appeared at that time to be the Emperor Charles V; the world quaked in apprehension. ”

“ When Philip lay dying he held in his hand the common little crucifix that his mother and father had adored when they too had died; his friends buried it upon his breast when they came to inter him in the Escorial, where it still lies with him in a coffin made of the timbers of the Cinco Chagas, not the least glorious of his fighting galleys.
Arterio-sclerosis, high blood-pressure, hyperpiesis, and chronic Bright’s disease—all more or less names for the same thing, or at any rate for cognate disorders—form one of the great tragedies of the world. They attack the very men whom we can least spare ”

“ The law that the humour of one generation is merely grotesque to the next does not seem to apply to Don Quixote; and I dare swear that the picture of the mad old Don, brought home from the inn of Maritornes, looking so stately in a cage upon a bullock-wagon, guarded by troopers of the Holy Brotherhood, and escorted by the priest and the barber, with the distracted Sancho Panza buzzing about wondering what has become of his promised Governorship, is absolutely the funniest thing in all literature; all the funnier because the springs of our laughter flow from the fount of our tears. ”

“ All the time, as I read the story, she was really desirous of Charles, his brilliant father. Love-sick for Charles; love-sick for Philip, to whom she had a lawful right set at naught by leagues of sea; love-sick for any man whom her pride would allow her to possess—and I do not hint a word against her virtue—she is not a creature to scorn; she is rather to be pitied. Her father had been a man of strong passions and violent deeds; from him she had inherited that tendency to early degeneration of the cardiovascular system which led to her death from dropsy at the early age of forty-two ”

“ Misery, destitution, and superstition were man’s bedfellows; and the French mind seemed open to receive any marvel that promised relief from its intolerable agony. Into this land of terror was born a little maid whose mission it was to right the wrongs of France; a maiden who has remained, through all the vicissitudes of history, extraordinarily fascinating, yet an almost insoluble problem. It is undeniable that she has exercised a vast influence upon mankind, less by her actual deeds than by the ideal which she set up ”

“ During the next two centuries the peoples of France and Germany gradually evolved into two separate nations, but it was impossible for men to forget the great brooding power which had given the Pax Romana to the world, and its hallowed memory survived more beneficent than possibly it really was; it appeared to their imaginations that if it were possible to unite the sanctity of the Pope with the organizing power of Rome the blessed times [89] might again return when a man might reap in peace what he had sown in peace, and the long agony of the Dark Ages might be lifted from mankind. ”

“ The mentality which led Mary to persecute the English Protestants contained the same qualities as had led Joan of Arc to her career of unrivalled heroism, and to-day leads an old maid to keep parrots. When an old maid undresses it is said that she puts a cover over the parrot’s cage lest the bird should see her nakedness; that is a phase of the same mentality as Mary’s and Joan’s. Loneliness, sadness, suppressed longing for the unattainable—it is cruel to laugh at an old maid.
But Charles was to show himself mortal. ”

“ A kindly irony which enables us to laugh at the world and sympathize with its troubles is a very powerful aid in the battle; and if a doctor does his part in alleviating pain and postponing death—if he does his best for rich and poor, and always listens to the cry of the afflicted,—and if he endeavours to leave his wife and children in a position better than he himself began, I do not see what more can be expected of him either in this world or the next. ”

“ Spain and Venice quarrelled, and Lepanto was not followed up; Philip lost the chance of retrieving 1453 and of changing the history of Europe in Spain’s favour ever since. Christian set once more to killing Christian in the old melancholy way; Venice made peace with the Sultan, and Don John set about carving out a kingdom for himself. In dreams he saw himself monarch of Albania, or of the Morea; and in body he actually recaptured Tunis, once so gloriously held by his father. But Philip would not support him and he had to retire. Cervantes, in Don Quixote, evidently thinks Philip quite right. ”

“ For nearly eighty years England had been at her throat in a quarrel which to our minds simply exemplifies the difference between law and justice; for it seems that the King of England had mediæval law on his side, though to our minds no justice; the Black Death had returned more than once to harass those whom war had spared; no man reaped where he had sown, for his crops fell into the hands of freebooters. ”

“ These things were left for the poor to teach the rich.
This unsentimental harangue leads us to “the last knight of Europe”—Don John of Austria, around whose name there still shines a glamour of romance like the sound of a trumpet. About nine years after the death of the Empress Isabel, Charles V went a-wandering, still disconsolate, through his mighty empire. He was sad and lonely, for it was about the time when the arterio-sclerosis which was to kill him began to depress his spirits. ”

“ But who is so terrified as the old woman who trips on a rough edge of the carpet and fractures her thigh-bone? How she clings to life! What terrors attend her last few weeks on earth, till merciful pneumonia comes to send her to endless sleep!
I do not remember to have noticed any of that ecstasy which we are told should attend the dying of the saved. Generally, so far as I have observed, the dying man falls asleep some hours or days before he actually dies, and does not wake again. ”

“ Edward Fitzgerald—who, be it remembered, knew no more about these things than you or I—summed up the whole matter in “Man’s forgiveness give—and take,” and probably this simple line has given more comfort to thoughtful men than all Jowett’s bluster. Fitzgerald has at least voiced the instinctive rebellion which every man must feel when he considers the facts of human nature, even if he has given us otherwise no more guidance than a call to a poor kind of Epicureanism which lays stress on a book of verse underneath a bough, and thou beside me singing in a wilderness. ”

“ Don John and Philip would have quarrelled, and that Fortune would have been even less kind to Spain than she was. Those who love Spain must be on the whole rather glad that Don John died before he had been able to cause more trouble than he did. It is difficult to agree entirely with those who would put the blame entirely on Philip for the troubles between him and Don John, or would interpret every act of Philip to his detriment. ”

“ He missed that opportunity, and the mediæval Empire, though it survived that extraordinary calamity, yet continued ramshackle, feeble, and mediævally glorious until long past the Protestant Reformation. Being Roman, of course it was anti-Lutheran, and devoted its lumbering energies to the destruction of the Protestants. No Holy Roman Emperor ever rivalled the greatness of Charles V, in whose frame shone all the romance and glamour of centuries. How vast was his power is shown when we consider that he ruled over the Netherlands, Burgundy, Spain, Austria, much of what is now Germany, and Italy ”

“ Epicureanism laid stress on the superiority of mental over physical happiness; it were better to worship at the shrine of Beethoven than of Venus, and better to take your pleasure in the library than in the wine-shop. But nobler than Epicurus was Zeno, the Stoic, whose influence on both the ancient and the modern worlds has been so profound. If we are to take philosophy as our guide, Stoicism, which inculcates duty and self-restraint, and is supported by the great names of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, is probably our best leading light. ”

“ Like most idealists he died a sad and disappointed man, certain of one thing only—that he was out of touch with the majority of mankind.
Cervantes was far too great an artist to kill his old hero by some such folly as “brain fever”—which nonsense I guess to have been typhoid. I believe that in describing the death of Don Quixote he was thinking of some old man whom he had seen crawl home to die after a severe physical shock, disappointed and disillusioned in a world of practical youth in which there is no room for romantic old age—probably some kind old man whom he himself had loved. ”

“ Pepys seems to have set down every thought [158] that came into his head as he wrote; things which the ordinary man hardly admits to himself—even supposing that he ever thinks or does them—this stately Secretary of the Navy calmly wrote in black and white with a garrulous effrontery that absolutely disarms criticism. In its extraordinary self-revelation the Diary is unique; it is literally true that there is nothing else like it in any other language, and it is almost impossible that anything like it will ever be written again; the man, the moment, and the occasion can never recur. ”