The Poetic Life

Giovanni della Casa, Giovanni della Casa's Poem Book, tr. John Van Sickle (1999), III., The Healthy Style of Poetic Life, pp. 45-47:  

        If you delight in wisdom's watchful care, 
        and keen ability gives strength, enjoy
        henceforth the gods' bright gift: thus you will live
        more rightly, much more fully, far more fitly 
        whatever time your friendly fates spin out.
        Nor how the commons view you need you give
        great weight, unruffled: much that stupid crowd
        weighs basely. Pay no heed, avoid
        retreating from the field where you're engaged:
        No sane man puts the people's view ahead
        of better men's applause, which you will get by right,
        since, Bembo, you already far outrun
        all others on this course: believe a straight
        and canny referee. Yet, meanwhile, we
        get charged with sloth by folks, lest you suppose
        they prize this simple life. No, they would have
        us give up trifling verse for real affairs,
        to sunny day from shade and darkness move:
        they blame inaction actively, they whine
        that we with wheedling love corrupt the pure
        in heart; like sour-faced relatives they scold. [...]

Between Thought And Feeling, And Amiel And Clough

Richard Holt Hutton, Chriticism on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers (MacMillan, 1894), vol. I., ch. XXI., Amiel and Clough, pp. 212-3:

Thought undoubtedly does correct, and correct with most salutary inexorability, the illusions of feeling. And, again, feeling does correct, and correct with equally salutary inexorability, the day-dreams of thought. The man who habitually distrusts his feelings is just as certain to live in a world of illusion as the man who habitually distrusts his thoughts. But undoubtedly Amiel, who allowed the illusion of his career much more absolutely than Clough ever allowed his faith in «the massy strengths of abstraction» to govern his career, made the greater mistake of the two. Had Amiel not been so sedulous to ward off the pressure of responsibilities to which he did not feel fully equal, he might doubtless have made mistakes, and entered into relations which he would have found painful to him and a shock to his ideal. But the truth is that those relations which are not all that we desire them to be in human life, which are not ideal relations, are of the very essence of the discipline of the will and of the affections, and no man ever yet escaped them, without escaping one of the most useful experiences of life. Amiel, like Clough, was far too much afraid of hampering the free play of his intellect. No man ever yet did a great work for the world, without hampering the free play of his intellect. And yet it is no paradox to say that no man ever yet had the highest command of his intellect who had not times without number hampered its free play, in order that he might enter the more deeply into the deeper relations of the human heart.

The Geniuses Without Learning

Joseph Addison, Essays and Tales (London Cassell, 1888), Genius, pp. 157-9:

Among great geniuses those few draw the admiration of all the world upon them, and stand up as the prodigies of mankind, who, by the mere strength of natural parts, and without any assistance of art or learning, have produced works that were the delight of their own times and the wonder of posterity.  There appears something nobly wild and extravagant in these great natural geniuses, that is infinitely more beautiful than all turn and polishing of what the French call a bel esprit, by which they would express a genius refined by conversation, reflection, and the reading of the most polite authors.  The greatest genius which runs through the arts and sciences takes a kind of tincture from them and falls unavoidably into imitation.

Many of these great natural geniuses, that were never disciplined and broken by rules of art, are to be found among the ancients, and in particular among those of the more Eastern parts of the world.  Homer has innumerable flights that Virgil was not able to reach, and in the Old Testament we find several passages more elevated and sublime than any in Homer.  At the same time that we allow a greater and more daring genius to the ancients, we must own that the greatest of them very much failed in, or, if you will, that they were much above the nicety and correctness of the moderns.  In their similitudes and allusions, provided there was a likeness, they did not much trouble themselves about the decency of the comparison: thus Solomon resembles the nose of his beloved to the tower of Lebanon which looketh towards Damascus, as the coming of a thief in the night is a similitude of the same kind in the New Testament.  It would be endless to make collections of this nature.  Homer illustrates one of his heroes encompassed with the enemy, by an ass in a field of corn that has his sides belaboured by all the boys of the village without stirring a foot for it; and another of them tossing to and fro in his bed, and burning with resentment, to a piece of flesh broiled on the coals.  This particular failure in the ancients opens a large field of raillery to the little wits, who can laugh at an indecency, but not relish the sublime in these sorts of writings.  The present Emperor of Persia, conformable to this Eastern way of thinking, amidst a great many pompous titles, denominates himself “the sun of glory” and “the nutmeg of delight.”  In short, to cut off all cavilling against the ancients, and particularly those of the warmer climates, who had most heat and life in their imaginations, we are to consider that the rule of observing what the French call the bienseance in an allusion has been found out of later years, and in the colder regions of the world, where we could make some amends for our want of force and spirit by a scrupulous nicety and exactness in our compositions.  Our countryman Shakespeare was a remarkable instance of this first kind of great geniuses.

The Wife's Lament

Old English Poems, tr. Cosette Faust & Stith Thompson (1918), 1. Pagan Poetry, 2. Gnomic Group, The Wife's Lament, pp. 73-74:

[...]                                        Here bitterly I have suffered

The faring of my lord afar. Friends there are on earth

Living in love,             in lasting bliss,

While, wakeful at dawn,     I wander alone

Under the oak-tree         the earth-cave near.

Sadly I sit there         the summer-long day,

Wearily weeping         my woeful exile,

My many miseries.        Hence I may not ever

Cease my sorrowing,     my sad bewailing,

Nor all the longings         of my life of woe. 

Always may the young man be mournful of spirit,

Unhappy of heart,         and have as his portion

Many sorrows of soul, unceasing breast-cares,

Though now blithe of behavior. Unbearable likewise

Be his joys in the world.    Wide be his exile

To far-away folk-lands     where my friend sits alone,

A stranger under stone-cliffs, by storm made hoary,

A weary-souled wanderer, by waters encompassed,

In his lonely lodging.         My lover endures

Unmeasured mind-care: he remembers too oft

A happier home.         To him is fate cruel

Who lingers and longs for the loved one’s return!

A Realisation

Otto von Bismarck, quoted in: Emil Ludwig, Bismarck; The Story of a Fighter (Blue Ribbon Books, 1927, reprinted 1934), tr. Eden and Cedar Paul, p. 304:

«People are much stupider than I had imagined!» was his generalisation after the first few months of his premiership.

The Feature Of Roman Corruption

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I. (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. 2, The Pagan Empire, p. 262:

The aristocracy may revel in every excess of ostentatious vice, but the great mass of the people, at the loom, the counter, or the plough, continue unaffected by their example, and the habits of life into which they are forced by the condition of their trades preserve them from gross depravity. It was the most frightful feature of the corruption of ancient Rome that it extended through every class of the community.

Lucid Love

Émile Verhaeren, The Love Poems of Émile Verhaeren, tr. F. S. Flint, 1916, xv.:

I dedicate to your tears, to your smile, my gentlest thoughts, those I tell you, those also that remain undefined and too deep to tell.

I dedicate to your tears, to your smile, to your whole soul, my soul, with its tears and its smiles and its kiss.

See, the dawn whitens the ground that is the colour of lees of wine; shadowy bonds seem to slip and glide away with melancholy; the water of the ponds grows bright and sifts its noise; the grass glitters and the flowers open, and the golden woods free themselves from the night.

Oh! what if we could one day enter thus into the full light; oh, what if we could one day, with conquering cries and lofty prayers, with no more veils upon us and no more remorse in us, oh! what if we could one day enter together into lucid love.

A Characterisation Of Carlyle By The Tainean Hand

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, History of English Literature (Philadelphia: H. Altemus, 1908), vol. 4, Modern Authors, ch. IV., Philosophy and History: Carlyle, pp. 311-12:

Many will find Carlyle presumptuous, coarse; they will suspect from his theories, and also from his way of speaking, that he looks upon himself as a great man, neglected, of the race of heroes; that, in his opinion, the human race ought to put themselves in his hands, and trust him with their business. Certainly he lectures us, and with contempt. He despises his epoch; he has a sulky, sour tone; he keeps purposely on stilts. He disdains objections. In his eyes, opponents are not up to his form. He abuses his predecessors: when he speaks of Cromwell's biographers, he takes the tone of a man of genius astray amongst pedants. He has the superior smile, the resigned condescension of a hero who feels himself a martyr, and he only quits it, to shout at the top of his voice, like an ill-bred plebeian.

All this is redeemed, and more, by rare merits. He speaks truly: minds like his are the most fertile. They are almost the only ones which make discoveries. Pure classifiers do not invent; they are too dry. «To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathise with it.» «Fantasy is the organ of the Godlike, the understanding is indeed thy window; too clear thou canst not make it; but fantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina, healthy or diseased.» In more simple language, this means that every object, animate or inanimate, is gifted with powers which constitute its nature and produce its development; that, in order to know it, we must recreate it in ourselves, with the train of its potentialities, and that we only know it entirely by inwardly perceiving all its tendencies, and inwardly seeing all its effects. And verily this process, which is the imitation of nature, is the only one by which we can penetrate nature; Shakspeare had it as an instinct, and Goethe as a method. There is none so powerful or delicate, so fitted to the complexity of things and to the structure of our mind. There is none more proper to renew our ideas, to withdraw us from formulas, to deliver us from the prejudices, with which education involves us, to overthrow the barriers in which our surroundings enclose us. It is by this that Carlyle escaped from conventional English ideas, penetrated into the philosophy and science of Germany, to think out again in his own manner the Germanic discoveries, and to give an original theory of man and of the universe.

Abides With None

Saʿdī Shīrāzī, The Gulistān; Or, Rose Garden, tr. Edward B. Eastwick (London: 1880, 2nd edt.), ch. 1, p. 24:

        The world, my brother! will abide with none,
        By the world's Maker let thy heart be won.
        Rely not, nor repose on this world's gain,
        For many a son like thee she has reared and slain.
        What matters, when the spirit seeks to fly,
        If on a throne or on bare earth we die?

Life Is Found In The Inattention To Life

Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay, tr. Richard Howard, ch. 6, Abdications, In The Secret of Moralists:

. . . acting, we do not meditate upon action; if I study my “neighbor” it is because he has ceased to be my neighbor, and I am no longer “myself” if I analyze myself: I become an object along with all the rest. The believer who weighs his faith ends by putting God in the scales, and safeguards his fervor only out of fear of losing it. Placed at the antipodes of naïvete, of integral and authentic existence, the moralist exhausts himself in a vis-á-vis with himself and with others: comedian, microcosm of second thoughts, he does not endure the artifice which men, in order to live, spontaneously accept and incorporate in their nature. Everything seems convention: he divulges the motives of feelings and actions, he unmasks the simulacra of civilization, because he suffers at having glimpsed and gone beyond them; for these simulacra give life, they are life, whereas his existence, in contemplating them, strays into the search for a “nature” which does not exist and which, if it did, would be as alien to him as the artifices which have been added to it. All psychological complexity reduced to its elements, explained and dissected, involves an operation much deadlier to the operator than to the victim. We liquidate our feelings by pursuing their detours, and our impulses if we ambush their trajectory; and when we detail the movements of others, it is not they who lose their way. . . . Everything we do not participate in seems unreasonable; but those who move cannot fail to advance, whereas the observer, whichever way he turns, registers their futile triumph only to excuse his own defeat. This is because there is life only in the inattention to life.

Between Seneca And Plutarch Again, And The Judgment Of Quintilian

Arthur Murphy, The Works of Cornelius Tacitus, vol. VIII. (London, 1805), Notes on the Dialogue Concerning Oratory, pp. 285-288:

Menage says, if all the books in the world were in the fire, there is not one, whom he would so eagerly snatch from the flames as Plutarch. That author never tires him; he reads him often, and always finds new beauties. He cannot say the same of Seneca; not but there are admirable passages in his works, but when brought to the test, they lose their apparent beauty by a close examination. Seneca serves to be quoted in the warmth of conversation, but is not of equal value in the closet. Whatever be the subject, he wishes to shine, and, by consequence, his thoughts are too refined, and often false.

. . . Quintilian was his [Seneca's] contemporary; he saw, and heard the man, and, in less than twenty years after his death, pronounced judgment against him. In the conclusion of the first chapter of his tenth book, after having given an account of the Greek and Roman authors, he says, he reserved Seneca for the last place, because, having always endeavoured to counteract the influence of a bad taste, he was supposed to be influenced by motives of personal enmity. But the case was otherwise. He saw that Seneca was the favourite of the times, and, to check the torrent that threatened the ruin of all true eloquence, he exerted his best efforts to diffuse a sounder judgment. He did not wish that Seneca should be laid aside: but he could not, in silence, see him preferred to the writers of the Augustan age, whom that writer endeavoured to depreciate, conscious, that, having chosen a different style, he could not hope to please the taste of those, who were charmed with the authors of a former day. But Seneca was still in fashion; his partisans continued to admire, though it cannot be said that they imitated him. He fell short of the ancients, and they were still more beneath their model. Since they were content to copy, it were to be wished that they had been able to vie with him. He pleased by his defects, and the herd of imitators chose the worst. They acquired a vicious manner, and flattered themselves that they resembled their master. But the truth is, they disgraced him. Seneca, it must be allowed, had many great and excellent qualities; a lively imagination; vast erudition, and extensive knowledge. He frequently employed others to make researches for him, and was often deceived. He embraced all subjects; in his philosophy, not always profound, but a keen censor of the manners, and on moraa subjects truly admirable. He has brilliant passages, and beautiful sentiments; but the expression is in a false taste, the more dangerous, as he abounds with delightful vices. You would have wished that he had written with his own imagination, and the judgment of others. To sum up his character: had he known how to rate little things; had he been above the petty ambition of always shining; had he not been fond of himself; had he not weakened his force by minute and dazzling sentences; he would have gained, not the admiration of boys, but the suffrage of the judicious. At present he may be read with safety by those, who have made acquaintance with better models. His works afford the fairest opportunity of distinguishing the beauties of fine writing from their opposite vices. He has much to be approved, and even admired: but a just selection is necessary, and it is to be regretted that he did not choose for himself. Such was the judgment of Quintilian . . .

See also: Between Seneca And Plutarch

Between Seneca And Plutarch

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I. (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. 2, The Pagan Empire, p. 243-4:

Plutarch, whose fame as a biographer has, I think, unduly eclipsed his reputation as a moralist, may be justly regarded as the leader of this movement, and his moral writings may be profitably compared with those of Seneca, the most ample exponent of the sterner school. Seneca is not unfrequently self-conscious, theatrical, and overstrained. His precepts have something of the affected ring of a popular preacher. The imperfect fusion of his short sentences gives his style a disjointed and, so to speak, granulated character, which the Emperor Caligula happily expressed when he compared it to sand without cement; yet he often rises to a majesty of eloquence, a grandeur both of thought and of expression, that few moralists have ever rivalled. Plutarch, though far less sublime, is more sustained, equable, and uniformly pleasing. The Montaigne of antiquity, his genius coruscates playfully and gracefully around his subject; he delights in illustrations which are often singularly vivid and original, but which, by their excessive multiplication, appear sometimes rather the texture than the ornament of his discourse. A gentle, tender spirit, and a judgment equally free from paradox, exaggeration, and excessive subtilty, are the characteristics of all he wrote. Plutarch excels most in collecting motives of consolation; Seneca in forming characters that need no consolation. There is something of the woman in Plutarch; Seneca is all a man. The writings of the first resemble the strains of the flute, to which the ancients attributed the power of calming the passions and charming away the clouds of sorrow, and drawing men by a gentle suasion into the paths of virtue; the writings of the other are like the trumpet-blast, which kindles the soul with an heroic courage. The first is most fitted to console a mother sorrowing over her dead child, the second to nerve a brave man, without flinching and without illusion, to grapple with an inevitable fate.

Ignoring One's Own Instructions

Petrarca, Petrarch's Letters to Classical Authors, tr. Mario Emilio Cosenza (Chicago, 1910), 1, Letter to M. T. Cicero, pp. 3-4 (with the translator's footnote):

. . . Forsooth, what boots it to instruct others, of what profit to discourse eternally on the virtues, and that too in most eloquent terms, if, at the same time, one turns a deaf ear to his own instructions? Ah, how much better had it been for a man of declining years, and especially for one devoted to studies, even as thou, to have lived his last days in the quiet of the country, meditating (as thou thyself hast said somewhere) on that everlasting life, and not on this fleeting one.1

1. The reference is very indefinite: “in tranquillo rure senuisse, de perpetua illa, ut ipse quodam loco ais, non de hac iam exigua vita cogitantem” (Vol. III, p. 263). The passages which Petrarch had in mind may have been De sen., 49: “If, however, we have something that may serve as food (so to speak) for study and learning, there is nothing more pleasant than a leisurely old age;” and 51: “I come now to the pleasures of a country life, with which I am infinitely delighted. None of these finds an obstruction in old age, and they are pleasures which appear to me to be most nearly suited to the life of a philosopher.” These two passages affirm that the sage should live a leisurely and studious old age in the country. As to meditating on the eternal life, Petrarch may have been thinking of Acad. pr., ii, 127:

By no means, however, do I hold that the studies of the natural philosophers should be excluded. Indeed, a consideration and contemplation of nature constitutes the natural food (so to speak) for our minds and talents. We are elevated thereby, and we seem to rise to a higher state of being. We disdain human affairs; and, in meditating on the higher and heavenly things, we scorn earthly matters as being small and insignificant—“cogitantesque supera atque caelestia haec nostra ut exigua et minima contemnimus.”

From Slaves, To Freedmen, To Dethroners

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I. (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. 2, The Pagan Empire, p. 233:

From the time of Caligula, for several reigns, the most influential citizens were freedmen, who occupied the principal offices in the palace, and usually obtained complete ascendancy over the emperors. Through them alone petitions were presented. By their instrumentality the Imperial favours were distributed. They sometimes dethroned the emperors. They retained their power unshaken through a succession of revolutions. In wealth, in power, in the crowd of their courtiers, in the splendour of their palaces in life, and of their tombs in death, they eclipsed all others, and men whom the early Roman patricians would have almost disdained to notice, saw the proudest struggling for their favour.

To Love And Hate With Mouth And Heart

Theognis, The Maxims of Theognis, in: Rev. J. Banks, The Works of Hesiod, Callimachus, and Theognis (Bohn's Classical Library, 1879), p. 222:

Do not caress me in words, and keep your mind and heart elsewhere, if you love me and if there dwells in you a faithful mind. Either love me, cherishing a sincere mind, or disown and hate me, having raised a quarrel openly. But he who, with one tongue, has yet his mind at variance, this man, Cyrnus, is a formidable comrade, better as a foe than when a friend. 

Carlylian Image Of The Politician Seeking Popularity

Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. V., Stump-Orator, May 1, 1850:

Such a soul, though to the eye he still keeps tumbling about in the Parliamentary element, and makes "motions," and passes bills, for aught I know,—are we to define him as a living one, or as a dead? Partridge the Almanac-Maker, whose "Publications" still regularly appear, is known to be dead! The dog that was drowned last summer, and that floats up and down the Thames with ebb and flood ever since,—is it not dead? Alas, in the hot months, you meet here and there such a floating dog; and at length, if you often use the river steamers, get to know him by sight. "There he is again, still astir there in his quasi-stygian element!" you dejectedly exclaim (perhaps reading your Morning Newspaper at the moment); and reflect, with a painful oppression of nose and imagination, on certain completed professors of parliamentary eloquence in modern times. Dead long since, but not resting; daily doing motions in that Westminster region still,—daily from Vauxhall to Blackfriars, and back again; and cannot get away at all! Daily (from Newspaper or river steamer) you may see him at some point of his fated course, hovering in the eddies, stranded in the ooze, or rapidly progressing with flood or ebb; and daily the odor of him is getting more intolerable: daily the condition of him appeals more tragically to gods and men.

Literary Petrifactions

William Carew Hazlitt, The Confessions of a Collector, (London, 1897), ch. I., Confessions of a Collector, pp. 2-3:

We hear of the Fratres Poloni,1 five stupendous folios, brimful of erudition—books which seem, to our more frivolous and superficial and hurrying age, better suited to occupy a niche in a museum as a monumental testimony to departed scholarship—books, alas! which those blind instruments of the revolutionary spirit of change, the paper mill and the fire, draw day by day nearer to canonisation in a few inviolable resting-places, as in sanctuaries dedicated to the holy dead. They will enter on a new and more odorous life: we shall look awfully upon them as upon literary petrifactions, which to bygone ages were living and speaking things.

1. The Fratres Poloni (Eng.: The Polish Brethren) describe the collected works of those eminent Unitarian interpreters, who flourished in Poland, A. D. 1575-1660, and whose views, in a more condensed form, may be seen in the Racovian Catechism, translated into English by Rees, Lond. 12mo. 1818. [quoted from a footnote we find in: J. P. Dabney, Annotations on the New Testament, (Cambridge: 1829), pt. I., p. 148.]

Photius On Lucian

La Rue van Hook, The Literary Criticism in the Bibliotheca of Photius, (in: Classical Philology Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Apr., 1909)), II., The Romancers, pp. 184-5:

In nearly all of his works Lucian is writing a comedy on Greek things; on their error in god-making, their ungovernable and intemperate licentiousness, the monstrous beliefs and fictions of even the poets and their consequent mistakes in government, and the irregular course and vicissitudes of their lives throughout, the boastful nature of their very philosophers who have naught save hypocrisy and empty pretense. In a word, as we have said, his aim is to produce a comedy, in prose, of Greek life. He seems to be one of those who worship nothing seriously; he makes fun of and ridicules the creeds of others and does not posit what he himself believes, unless one calls not having a creed, a creed. In style he is of the best (ἄριστος) employing a diction which is clear, current, and very striking (ἐμφατικός). He is a lover, if anyone is, of distinctness (εὐκρίνεια) and purity, with brilliancy and grandeur in due proportion. His composition is so arranged that the reader seems not to be reading prose but it is as if a certain delightful song without definite accompaniment of music were dropping into the ears of the listener. And in a word, as we have said, his style is of the best (ἄριστος) and not in keeping with his subjects under discussion at which he knew how to laugh.

The Poets Of The Anthologia Palatina

John Addington Symonds, Studies on the Greek Poets, vol. II., (New York: 1880), ch. XXI., The Anthology, pp. 281-2:

If we might compare the study of Greek literature to a journey in some splendid mountain region, then we might say with propriety that from the sparkling summits where Æschylus and Sophocles and Pindar sit enthroned we turn in our less strenuous moods to gather the meadow flowers of Meleager, Palladas, Callimachus. Placing them between the leaves of the book of our memory, we possess an everlasting treasure of sweet thoughts, which will serve in after-days to remind us of those scenes of Olympian majesty through which we travelled. The slight effusions of these minor poets are even nearer to our hearts than the masterpieces of the noblest Greek literature. They treat with a touching limpidity and sweetness of the joys and fears and hopes and sorrows that are common to all humanity. They introduce us to the actual life of a bygone civilization, stripped of its political or religious accidents, and tell us that the Greeks of Athens or of Sidon thought and felt exactly as we feel. Even the Graffiti of Pompeii have scarcely more power to reconstruct the past and summon as in dreams the voices and the forms of long-since-buried men. There is yet another way in which the Anthology brings us closer to the Greeks than any other portion of their literature. The lyrists express an intense and exalted mood of the race in its divine adolescence. The tragedians exhibit the genius of Athens in its maturity. The idyllists utter a rich nightingale note from the woods and fields of Sicily. But the Anthology carries us through all the phases of Hellenic civilization upon its uninterrupted undercurrent of elegiac melody. The clear fresh light of the morning, the splendor of noonday, the mellow tints of sunset, and the sad gray hues of evening are all there. It is a tree which bears the leaves and buds and blossoms and fruitage of the Greek spirit on its boughs at once. Many intervals in the life of the nation which are represented by no other portion of its literature—the ending, for example, of the first century before Christ—here receive a brilliant illustration. Again, there is no more signal proof of the cosmopolitan nature of the later Greek culture than is afforded by the Anthology. From Rome, Alexandria, Palestine, Byzantium, no less than from the isles and continent of Greece, are recruited the poets, whose works are enshrined in this precious golden treasury of fugitive pieces.

Foreign And Civil Wars

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I., (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. 2, The Pagan Empire, p. 232:

Foreign wars, which develop with great intensity distinctive national types, and divert the public mind from internal changes, are usually favourable to the conservative spirit; but civil wars are essentially revolutionary, for they overwhelm all class barriers and throw open the highest prizes to energy and genius.