barn-yard "interiors" and the beasts of the field. Dr. Johnson's well-known foibles with regard to the Cock Lane Ghost and the superstitions of the Hebrides and kindred subjects, have been made to cover a host of puerilities in these more "enlightened" days. In fact, it may be said of the acknowledged founder of any sort of school, that if he could return to earth for a season, he would be shocked beyond measure at the developments of his teaching, and would institute such a sweeping reformation as would leave seven-eighths of his followers screaming in chorus against the destruction of their rock and the condemnation of their theories. In the higher Politics, this would be particularly true. Even Voltaire would refuse to be responsible for the excesses of the revolutionary period. Charles Fox would repudiate the Dilkes, Chamberlains, and Jenkinses with fiery scorn. I doubt extremely if even Mr. Cobden would permit his Free Trade theories to cover a changed condition of commerce under which British goods are met everywhere by hostile tariffs, while foreign goods of the same kind are admitted free to English markets, destroying the industry of the British workman, whose tea, tobacco, liquors, and medicines are taxed almost beyond endurance. It appears to the present writer that no man has suffered more from the unwarranted assumptions of his followers than Lord Macaulay. And the references made to him by Mr. Laurier, in his famous lecture of some months ago, and by Sir Francis Hincks at a very recent period, induce me to pen a few observations which occurred to me on a second perusal of Mr. Trevelyan's noble "Life." Stated broadly, the conclusion I have come to is this, that from the date of Macaulay's re-entry into public life, after his return from India, there was a continued and ever-increasing divergence of opinion between him and the bulk of the Liberal Party. And from this point of view it seems not only impossible, but a little ridiculous to try to make the Whig historian the fosterfather of a Colonial Liberalism which contains few, if any, of the prime postulates of Lord Macaulay's political beliefs. If any curious reader of his "Life" will take it up and peruse the second volume carefully, I think evidences of the divergence I have referred to can be found, if not as thick as blackberries, at least in numbers sufficient to support the And theory I have advanced. It should never be forgotten of Lord Macaulay that his Liberalism was largely of a purely literary character. It seems as if his mental attitude towards Liberalism was like what many people imagine Dr. Newman's mental attitude to be towards Roman Catholicism. His Liberalism was in truth Whiggism of the Queen Anne period. Montague and Somers, not Lord Russell and Earl Grey, were the gods of his idolatry; and his admiration for the revolution was a warmer feeling than his regard for the Reform Bill. Nor should it be forgotten that he started as a Tory. to the last and from the first his personal attitude towards the people as a people was one more characteristic of an Edinburgh Tory than of a Clapham or London Liberal. He had not one of the "points" of a Liberal leader. He was not fond of appealing to the masses; he was not fond of public speaking, he was not genial, he was not popular; he neglected his correspondents; he snubbed delegations. He thought he was doing the people of Edinburgh an honour in representing them, and that in re-electing him they did but make an act of "reparation" which was due from them to him. This was not the conventional Liberal note of personal conduct. But it is of his party relations that I wish more particularly to speak. Almost at the outset of his career he learned to have a hearty hatred for Lord Brougham, the great Liberal Champion, and this hatred never ceased. It was probably mutual, as a reference to Brougham's autobiography might reveal, but for that there is no occasion. Just here it may be interesting to notice Lord Brougham's views on Lord Durham's report, about which Sir Francis Hincks has had so much to say. "It was," Brougham said, second-rate article for the Edinburgh Review. The matter came from a swindler, the style from a coxcomb, and the Dictator furnished only six letters-D-U-R-H-A-M." (See Macaulay's Life, vol. 11. p. 49.) caulay's peculiar views concerning parties began, as has been said, almost immediately after his return from India. The Whigs were not in good odour, and indeed were on the down grade to the break-up of 1841. Macaulay saw at once their unwisdom and their weakness. In 1838 he wrote: "My own suspicion is that the Tories in the House of Lords will lose reputation, though I do not imagine that the Government will gain 66 a Ma 3.. His very first effort in Parliament was an effort to justify the privilege claimed by the Government, of permitting some of the ministers to vote against ministerial measures; and it is curious to notice that the defence was made altogether from the literary point of view, and without ever once discussing the principle of the thing. His next was to defend Lord Cardigan for practices for which in these days his lordship would not be permitted to remain in the British service, at least in high command, for twenty-four hours; and Mr. Trevelyan admits that this heavy duty was "quite sufficient occupation for one minister." In 1843, Macaulay's distaste for Whig policy was so marked, that a letter of that period will be quite justifiable even in a short article :--- ALBANY, Feb'y, 1843. DEAR ELLIS :-I never thought that I should live to sympathise with Brougham's abuse of the Whigs; but I must own that we deserve it all. I suppose that you have heard of the stupid and disgraceful course which our leaders have resolved to take. I really cannot speak or write of it with patience. They are going to vote thanks to Ellenborough in direct opposition to their opinion, and with an unanswerable case against him on their hands, only that they may save Auckland from recrimination. They will not save him, however. Cowardice is a mighty poor defence against malice, and to sacrifice the whole weight and respectability of our party to the feelings of one man is-but the thing is too bad to talk about. I cannot avert the disgrace of our party; but I do not choose to share it. I shall therefore go to Clapham quietly, and leave those who have cooked this dirt-pie for us, to eat it. I did not think that any poli tical matter would have excited me so much as this has done. I fought a very hard battle, but had nobody except Lord Minto and Lord Clanricarde to stand by me. I could easily get up a mutiny among our rank and file if I chose, In 1845, after having poured on Peel all the vials of his indignant rhetoric, we find Macaulay writing thus to his sister Hannah : "If, which is not absolutely impossible, though improbable, Peel should still try to patch up a Conservative administration, and should, as the head of that administration, propose the repeal of the Corn Laws, my course is clear. I must support him with all the energy I have till the question is carried. Then I am free to oppose him." And in the same letter he writes, "If Lord John should undertake to form a Whig ministry, and should ask my assistance, I cannot in honour refuse it. But I shall distinctly tell him, and tell my colleagues and constituents, that I will not again go through what I went through in Lord Melbourne's administration.” In 1845 again, December 20th, we find Macaulay indicting his party leaders to his sister Hannah. He writes as follows :-“I have no disposition to complain of the loss of office. On the contrary, my escape from the slavery of a placeman is my only consolation. But I feel that we are in an ignominious position as a party." It was after Lord Grey's disagreement had prevented Lord John from forming a cabinet, and the public interests were temporarily sacrificed to personal considerations. I pass over the quarrel with his constituency and his defeat at Edinburgh in 1847. In that case his language and conduct were such as to mark with the greatest emphasis his departure from Whig principles and his own eloquent professions, even in his history, of the reverence which popular judgment should always receive at the hands of the people's representatives. At page 178 of the "Life," after his enforced retirement from political life, we read "Sometimes he would recast his thoughts and give them over again in the shape of an epigram. You call me a Liberal,' he said, but I don't know that in these days I deserve the name. I am opposed to the abolition of standing armies. I am opposed to the abrogation of capital punishment. I am opposed to the destruction of the National Church. In short, I am in favour of war, hanging, and church establishments.'' See page 32 34 'Macaulay's indifference to the vicissitudes of party politics had by this time grown into a confirmed habit of mind. His correspondence during the Spring of 1857, contains but few and brief allusions to even catastrophes as striking as the ministerial defeat upon the China war, and the overwhelming reverse of fortune which ensued when the question was referred to the polling 'Was there ever anything,' he writes, booths. since the fall of the rebel angels like the smash of the Anti-corn-law league? How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer!' Macaulay's opinion on the matter, so far as he had any opinion, was in favour of the Government, and against the Coalition. I am glad,' he wrote, on the eve of the debate, that I have done with politics. I should not have been able to avoid a pretty sharp encounter with Lord John.’” During the period that elapsed between his defeat at Edinburgh and his re-election in 1852, his mind had been losing its purely partisan bent, and on the occasion of his first speech to the electors of his constituency we read that he reviewed the events of the past five years "in a strain of lofty impartiality although he did, in the course of it, "change his tone," but only for a little while, to give them a taste of his old "rattling party quality." There was an absence of asperity in the speech, which, considering the relations of parties was rather striking in a man who was looked upon, and with justice, as a great party champion. In the same year we read in his diary a tribute to the "practical ability" of Mr. Disraeli. And again we read, during the Hear we may finish. It seems pretty clear progress of the formation of Lord John's that during the most eminent portion of his Government in 1852, of "the sympathy, not unmingled with amusement, with which he career, even while the Whigs and Liberals were looking to him with pride and confilistened to the confidences of his old Whig colleagues;" sympathy and amusement being dence, he was looking away from them, and queer feelings for an old political colleague gradually growing in beliefs on public questo entertain for the men at whose side he had tions that in their due logical consequences fought his way to fame, and from whose ad- would in time have compelled him towards, In our if not into, the Conservative camp. miring support he had received his first adday, short as is the time that has elapsed In Novemvances and his greatest fortune. ber, 1852, he writes: "Joe Hume talked since his death, is it not more likely that he would be found supporting the Government to me earnestly about the necessity for a and party that have reformed the representHe said much union with the Liberals. about the ballot and the franchise. I told ation, improved the sanitary condition of the people, protected the national honour, exhim that I could easily come to some compromise with some of his friends on these tended the territory of the empire by bloodless conquests, consolidated the colonies matters, but that there were other ques-under a British form of government, and an He tions about which I feared there was And let me con- preserved the peace of Europe in the face of insane Liberal agitations, rather than following in the train of those who carry their 66 burning" questions and "blazing" principles-the entire secularization of schools in a country with a national Church, and the destruction of that Church in a country in which, as Newman said, "it is the great bulwark against infidelity"-at the head of an army of agitators and radicals, with whom the great Whig historian would have nothing in common? And by parity of reasoning, what hope is there to find in Lord Macaulay a sponsor for a misty programme of Liberalism, in which he could not find one principle, not parties, of common to which he could approve? all MARTIN. J. GRIFFIN. IF BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM. I. THE MAN. ness,"-must be charged, even in an age of deification of science, with a far deeper and intenser interest than the unconscious growth of Bathybius or Amoeba in ocean depths, or the development of Mollusc or Ascidian in some remote geological period. Within the last half century, during which, contemporaneously with a growing materialism, there has grown up also, on the other hand, a growing appreciation of the spiritual history of the human race, Buddha and Buddhism have been exciting more and more attention, and have attracted to themselves the careful study of many of the best minds of Europe. Formerly, indeed, all distinct knowledge of either seemed hopelessly enshrouded in myth and mist, and the ideas current even among learned men, were vague in the extreme; as may be seen in the fact that the Manichæans believed Buddha, Christ, and Mani, to be one and the same person, and that, even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, books were written to prove Buddha identical with the Egyptian Thoth, or with Mercury, or Wodan, or Zoroaster, or Pythagoras; while even so recent and so profound an Orientalist as Sir William Jones identified him, first with Odin, and afterwards with Shishak, "who, either in person or b ya colony from Egypt, imported into India the mild heresy of the ancient Buddhas." The discovery, however, in 1824, by Mr. Hodgson, English Resident at Nepaul, of the ori nothing human is foreign" to any | man, and if we believe, with Max Müller, that the history of religion is the history of the "divine education of the human race," then that system of belief which has stood for a religion during thousands of years, to a third of that race, must be one of no little interest to all who care to trace the higher development of humanity. And he who, as its founder, has so mightily influenced the lives and destinies of countless millions, deserves a larger share of attention than many who now usurp a much larger portion of it. Place beside his influence on mankind that of any military hero of ancient or modern history, and the latter sinks into insignificance; and yet, for hundreds who are familiar with the deeds of a Cæsar or a Napoleon, there are, perhaps, a few here and there, who have any but the vaguest ideas to associate with the name of Gautama Buddha. Mr. Morley most reasonably objects to Dr. Draper's "fundamental axiom of history that human progress depends upon increase of our knowledge of the conditions of material phenomena," as if, says Mr. Morley, "moral advance, the progressive elevation of types of character and ethical ideals, were not, at least, an equally important cause of improvement in civilization." To those who think thus, and their number must include all who appreciate the higher issues of man's complex life, the life of the founder of Buddhism must be one of the most im-ginal Buddhist Canon in Sanskrit, preserved portant landmarks in the history of man- in the monasteries there, followed immekind, second only in its character and effects diately by the discoveries of the Hungarian to that of the infinitely greater light, the traveller Csoma de Körös in Thibet, and the founder of Christianity Himself. For, to researches of Mr. Turnour among the Pali those who feel to how great an extent the originals of Buddhist sacred literature in Ceyspiritual history of the present is the out- lon, gave a new impetus to the study of come of the spiritual history of the past, the Buddhism. Among the vigorous and culpassionate yearnings and aspirations of the tivated minds that have given time and larace towards the mystery of the Infinite, bour to the work of disentangling from ancient its partial success in groping after a know- myths and piles of oriental MSS. some defiledge that ever eludes the human faculties, nite solution of a problem so interesting, we its ineffectual attempts to solve the old, find not only French savants and academiold problem of human life and the unknown cians—notably Eugéne Burnouf and M. Barfuture, and the relation of man to a dimly thélemy St. Hilaire and patient German conceived "Power that makes for righteous-philologists, but also British travellers and officials, and Christian missionaries, including at least two Roman Catholic Bishops; and by their combined labours it has come to pass that the vague heroic form which had loomed through the mists of ages and the enshrouding folds of myth and fable, as less human than divine, has grown, in the clearer light of the nineteenth century, into something better than a legendary demi-god, a true, living, self-devoted man, full of the "enthusiam of humanity," and, despite his strange missing of the knowledge of God, one of the greatest and purest of uninspired teachers and reformers. The various names by which Gautama Buddha has been called have been rather puzzling to ordinary readers, who have been hardly able to make out whether there was not more than one historical Buddha. The name Buddha is a generic one, meaning Enlightened, from the root budh, to know, answering somewhat to the Hebrew "Prophet." According to the Buddhist belief, one world has succeeded another from all eternity, following the earliest system of Evolution, and in each of these countless worlds and cycles of time, there have been Buddhas "enlightened" to teach mankind. In the present mundane system they believe that there have been seven great Buddhas, the last and greatest being the Buddha of history, Sakya muni, Gautama Buddha. The first name, meaning monk or hermit of the Sakyas, was probably given to him in later life, as of course was the appellation of Buddha. The name Gautama he took from his clan, and another name, Siddhartha, is said to have been given to him in childhood, though its significance, "he whose desires are accomplished," seems to indicate a later origin. According to Buddhist legend, Gautama was born on the earth at least 550 times before he was born a Buddha, passing from the very lowest forms of existence up to the highest, by the force of unswerving moral purity, love, and charity. When, at last, he was to be born a Buddha, he is said to have selected his own parentage and place of birth. Oriental legend, always prodigal of its marvels towards heroes and saints, has surrounded his birth with every circumstance that could give it dignity and impressiveness in oriental eyes. Flowers lavishly blooming on all sides, ecstatic songs of miraculous birds, sweet strains of musical instruments played without hands, magical banquets undiminished by being freely partaken of, splendours of gold and silver, and of an unearthly glory, brighter than sun or moon, were among the portents that glorified the palace and heralded the birth of the Buddha. How to disentangle the real history of the man from the accretion of myth and marvel has been a work of no small difficulty and delicacy. As Max Müller remarks, it is by no means a safe process to "distil history out of legend by simply straining the legendary through the sieve of physical possibility," since many things which are physically possible, may be invention. while others, which seemed impossible, "have been reclaimed as historical, after removing from them the thin film of mythological phraseology." The very existence of such a man as Gautama Sakya Muni has been sup posed to be mythical, and the significance of the names of himself, his family, and his birth-place, been brought forward in proof of this hypothesis. Probably, we shall best approximate the truth as to the personal history of the recluse of Kapilavastu, by following mainly Max Müller in the brief and rational sketch he has given of the life of this wonderful man, as handed down by tradition, and committed to writing before the close of the First Century.* The time which Max Müller holds to be the most probable date of the death of the Buddha is 477 B. C., which would place his birth about 556 B. C. It was a time when a splendid cluster of great minds shone together in the intellectual sky. Confucius, in China, and Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Heraclitus, in Greece, were contemporaneous, or nearly so, with Gautama; while in Western Asia the Hebrew prophets, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Habakkuk, Obadiah, and Zephaniah lived and taught, during some part of the life of the great Indian reformer. Kapilavastu, his birth-place, was the capital of a province of the same name at the foot of the mountains of Nepaul, north of the present Oude. Its site and ruins were visited by Fahian in the fifth century, and by Hiouen Thsang, the great Chinese Buddhist, two centuries later. Suddhodana, the father of Gautama, was King of Kapilavastu, In the sketch which follows, the writer has followed-as well as Max Müller-the interesting life of Buddha given by Mr. C. D. Mills, an American writer, in his "Buddha and Buddhism," as this is in some respects fuller. |