SOLON AND PISISTRATUS.

Pisistratus. Here is a proof, Solon, if any were wanting, that either my power is small or my inclination to abuse it: you speak just as freely to me as formerly, and add unreservedly, which you never did before, the keenest sarcasms and the bitterest reproaches. Even such a smile as that, so expressive of incredulity and contempt, would arouse a desire of vengeance, difficult to controll, in any whom you could justly call impostor and usurper.

Solon. I do you no injustice, Pisistratus, which I should do if I feared you. Neither your policy nor your temper, neither your early education nor the society you have since frequented, and whose power over the mind and affections you can not at once throw off, would permit you to kill or imprison, or even to insult or hurt me. Such an action, you well know, would excite in the people of Athens as vehement a sensation as your imposture of the wounds, and you would lose your authority as rapidly as you acquired it. This however, you also know, is not the consideration which hath induced me to approach you, and to entreat your return, while the path is yet open, to reason and humanity.

Pisistratus. What inhumanity, my friend, have I committed?

Solon. No deaths, no tortures, no imprisonments, no stripes: but worse than these; the conversion of our species into a lower; a crime which the poets never feigned, in the wild attempts of the Titans or others who rebelled against the gods, and against the order they established here below.

together round one table in the narrowest lane of Athens.

Pisistratus. But, Solon, you yourself are an example, ill treated as you have been, that the levity of the Athenian people requires a guide and leader.

Solon. There are those who by their discourses and conduct, inflate and push forward this levity, that the guide and leader may be called for; and who then offer their kind services, modestly, and by means of friends, in pity to the weakness of their fellow-citizens; taking care not only of their follies, but also their little store of wisdom, putting it out to interest where they see fit, and directing how and where it shall be expended. Generous hearts! the Lacedemonians themselves, in the excess of their democracy, never were more zealous that corn and oil should be thrown into the common stock, than these are that minds should, and that no one swell a single line above another. Their own meanwhile are fully ade quate to all necessary and useful purposes, and constitute them a superintending Providence over the rest.

Pisistratus. Solon, I did not think you so addicted to derision: you make me join you. This in the latter part is a description of despotism; monster of Asia, and not yet known even in the most uncivilised region of Europe. For the Thracians and others, who have chieftains, have no kings, much less despots. In speaking of them we use the word carelessly, not thinking it worth our while to form names for such creatures, any more than to form collars and bracelets for

Pisistratus. Why then should you feign it them, or rings (if they use them) for their ears of me?

Solon. I do not feign it; and you yourself shall bear me witness that no citizen is further removed from falsehood, from the perversion of truth by the heat of passion, than Solon. Choose between the friendship of the wise and the adulation of the vulgar. Choose, do I say, Pisistratus? no, you can not your choice is already made. Choose then between a city in the dust and a city flourishing. Pisistratus. How so? who could hesitate? Solon. If the souls of the citizens are debased, who cares whether its walls and houses be still upright or thrown down? When free men become the property of one, when they are brought to believe that their interests repose on him alone, and must arise from him, their best energies are broken irreparably. They consider his will as the rule of their conduct, leading to emolument and dignity, securing from spoliation, from scorn, from contumely, from chains, and seize this compendious blessing (such they think it) without exertion and without reflection. From which cause alone there are several ancient nations so abject, that they have not produced in many thousand years as many rational creatures as we have seen

and noses.

Solon. Preposterous as this is, there are things more so, under our eyes: for instance, that the sound should become lame, the wise foolish, and this by no affliction of disease or age. You go further; and appear to wish that a man should become a child again: for what is it else, when he has governed himself, that he should go back to be governed by another? and for no better reason than because, as he is told, that other has been knocked down and stabbed. Incontrover tible proofs of his strength, his prudence, and the love he has been capable of conciliating in those about him!

Pisistratus. Solon! it would better become the gravity of your age, the dignity of your character, and the office you assume of adviser, to address me with decorous and liberal moderation, and to treat me as you find me.

Solon. So small a choice of words is left us, when we pass out of Atticism into barbarism, that I know not whether you, distinguished as you are both for the abundance and the selection of them, would call yourself in preference king or tyrant. The latter is usually the most violent, at least in

SOLON AND PISISTRATUS.

Solon. Either you lie now, Pisistratus, or you
Pisistratus. They exist, and shall exist, I swear
lied when you abolished my institutions.
to you.

Solon. Yes, they exist like the letters in a burnt
paper, which are looked down on from curiosity,
and just legible, while the last of the consuming
fire is remaining, but they crumble at a touch,
and indeed fly before it, weightless and inco-
herent.

the beginning; the former the most pernicious., men hath enjoyed so high a character as you, in Tyrants, like ravens and vultures, are solitary: wisdom and integrity. they either are swept off, or languish and pine away, and leave no brood in their places. Kings, as the origin of them is amid the swamps and wildernesses, take deeper root, and germinate more broadly in the loose and putrescent soil, and propagate their likenesses for several generations; a brood which (such is the power of habitude) does not seem monstrous, even to those whose corn, wine, and oil, it swallows up every day, and whose children it consumes in its freaks and festivals. I am ignorant under what number of them, at the present day, mankind in various countries lies prostrate; just as ignorant as I am how many are the desarts and caverns of the earth, or the eddies and whirlpools of the sea; but I should not be surprised to find it stated that, in Asia and Africa, there may be a dozen, greater or less. Europe has never been amazed at such a portent, either in the most corrupted or the most uncivilised of her nations, as a hereditary chief in possession of absolute power.

Pisistratus. The first despots were tyrannical and cruel.

Solon. And so the last will be. This is wanting, on some occasions, to arouse a people from the lethargy of servitude; and therefore I would rather see the cruellest usurper than the mildest king. Under him men lose the dignity of their nature: under the other they recover it.

Pisistratus. Hereditary kings too have been dethroned.

Solon. Certainly: for, besotted as those must be who have endured them, some subject at last hath had the hardihood and spirit to kick that fellow in the face and trample on him, who insists that the shoe must fit him because it fitted his father and grandfather, and that, if his foot will and pare rasp it. not enter, he will

Pisistratus. The worst of wickedness is that of bearing hard on the unfortunate; and near it is that of running down the fortunate: yet these are the two commonest occupations of mankind. We are despised if we are helpless; we are teased by petulance and tormented by reprehension if we are strong. One tribe of bar barians would drag us into their own dry desarts, and strip us to the skin: another would pierce us with arrows for being naked. What is to be done?

Solon. Simpler men run into no such perplexities. Your great wisdom, O Pisistratus! will enable you in some measure to defend your conduct; but your heart is the more vulnerable from its very greatness.

Pisistratus. I intend to exert the authority that is conferred on me by the people, in the maintenance of your laws, knowing no better.

Solon. Better there may be, but you will render worse necessary; and would you have it said hereafter by those who read them, " Pisistratus was less wise than Solon?"

Pisistratus. It must be said; for none among

Do you desire, Pisistratus, that your family shall
inherit your anxieties? If you really feel none
yourself, which you never will persuade me, nor
(I think) attempt it, still you may be much hap-
pier, much more secure and tranquil, by ceasing
to possess what you have acquired of late, provided
you cease early; for long possession of any pro-
perty makes us anxious to retain it, and insensible,
if not to the cares it brings with it, at least to the
suaded that their alarms and sorrows, their per-
real cause of them. Tyrants will never be per:
plexity and melancholy, are the product of tyranny:
they will not attribute a tittle of them to their
own obstinacy and perverseness, but look for it
all in another's. They would move everything
and be moved by nothing; and yet lighter
things move them than any other particle of
mankind.

Pisistratus. You are talking, Solon, of mere fools.

Solon. The worst of fools, Pisistratus, are those who once had wisdom. Not to possess what is good is a misfortune; to throw it away is a folly: but to change what we know hath served us, and would serve us still, for what never has and never can, for what on the contrary hath always been Observations on arbitrary power rigible idiot. pernicious to the holder, is the action of an incorcan never be made usefully to its possessors. There is not a foot-page about them at the bath whose converse on this subject is not more reasonable than mine would be. I could adduce no argument which he would not controvert, by the magical words "practical things" and "present times:" a shrug of the shoulder would overset all that my meditations have taught me in half a century of laborious inquiry and intense thought. "fit for Attica before the olive was sown among "These are theories," he would tell his master, Old men must always have their way. Will us. their own grey beards never teach them that time changes things?"

One fortune hath ever befallen those whom the indignant gods have cursed with despotical power; to feed upon falsehood, to loath and sicken at suspect the honest, and to abominate the brave. truth, to avoid the friendly, to discard the wise, to Like grubs in rotten kernels, they coil up for safety in dark hollowness, and see nothing but death in in the highest rank of dignities and virtues, and bursting from it. Although they place violence draw closely round their bodies those whose valour,

IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.

from the centre to the extremities, should animate [ the state, yet they associate the most intimately but I was happy in the performance of what I have Pisistratus. They need nothing from us mortals'; with singers, with buffoons, with tellers of tales, been taught is my duty. with prodigies of eating and drinking, with mountebanks, with diviners. and enthrall their enfeebled and abject spirits; These captivate and the first cry that rouses them from their torpor is the cry that demands their blood. Then would it appear by their countenances, that all they had scattered among thousands, had come secretly back again to its vast repository, and was issuing forth from every limb and feature, from every pore, from every hair upon their heads.

Solon. Piously, virtuously, and reasonably said, sacrifice: they, who give everything, can want my friend. The gods did not indeed want your nothing. The Athenians do want a sacrifice from you: they have an urgent necessity of something; the necessity of that very thing which you have taken from them, and which it can cost you nothing to replace. You have always been happier, you confess, in giving to the gods what you could have yourself used in your own house: believe What is man at last, O Pisistratus, when he is fellow-citizens what you have taken out of theirs, me, you will not be less so in giving back to your all he hath ever wished to be! the fortunate, the and what you very well know they will seize when powerful, the supreme! Life in its fairest form they can, together with your property and life. (such he considers it) comes only to flatter and You have been taught, you tell me, that sacrifice deceive him. Disappointments take their turn, to the gods is a duty: be it so: but who taught and harass him; weakness and maladies cast him you it? Was it a wiser man than you or I? Or down pleasures catch him again when he rises was it at a time of life when your reason was more from them, to misguide and blind and carry him mature than at present, or your interests better away: ambition struggles with those pleasures, understood? No good man ever gave anything and only in struggling with them seems to be his without being the more happy for it, unless to friend: they mar one another, and distract him: the undeserving, nor ever took anything away enemies encompass him; associates desert him; without being the less so. rivalries thwart, persecutions haunt him: another's and suspicion, a fear of the strong, a subjection thoughts molest and injure him; his own do worse to the weak; here is fawning, in order to be But here is anxiety than join with them and yet he shudders and fawned on again, as among sucking whelps half shrinks back at nothing so much as the creak-awake. He alone is the master of his fellow-men, ing of that door by which alone there is any escape.

who can instruct and improve them; while he was, is master of that other thing, but not of the who makes the people another thing from what it people. And supposing we could direct the city exactly as we would, is our greatness to be founded on this? A ditcher may do greater things: he may turn a torrent (a thing even more turbid and more precipitate) by his ditch! A sudden increase of power, like a sudden increase of blood, gives pleasure; but the new excitement being once gratified, the pleasure ceases.

Pisistratus! O Pisistratus! do we tire out the patience of mankind, do we prey upon our hearts, for this? Does Nature crave it? Does Wisdom dictate it? Can Power avert it? Descend then from a precipice, it is difficult to stand, it is impossible to repose on. Take the arm that would lead you and support you back, and restore you to your friends and country. He who places himself far above them, is (any child might tell you) far from them. What on earth can be imagined so horrible and disheartening, as to live without ever seeing to be at any time more contented than the chilI do not imagine the children of the powerful one creature of the same species! Being a tyrant dren of others, although I concede that the pow or despot, you are in this calamity. Imprison-erful themselves may be so for some moments, ment in a dungeon could not reduce you to it: false friends have done that for you which enemies could but attempt. If such is the harvest of their zeal, when they are unsated and alert, what is that which remains to be gathered in by you, when they are full and weary? Bitterness; the bitterness of infamy! And how will you quench it? By swallowing the gall of selfreproach!

Let me put to you a few questions, near to the point: you will answer them, I am confident, easily and affably.

Pisistratus, have you not felt yourself the happier, when in the fulness of your heart, you have made a large offering to the gods?

Pisistratus. Solon, I am not impious: I have made many such offerings to them, and have always been the happier.

Solon. Did they need your sacrifice?

paying however very dearly for those moments, by more in quantity and in value. Give a stranger, who has rendered you no service, four talents: the suddenness of the gift surprises and delights him: take them away again, saying, "Excuse me; I intended them for your brother; still, not wholly to disappoint you, I give you two." What think you; do you augment or diminish that man's store of happiness?

character: but I think in nearly all instances you
Pisistratus. It must depend on his temper and
would diminish it.

we expect, we are dissatisfied; and what we have
Solon. Certainly. When we can not have what
deprive them of one toy, and they push the rest
ceases to afford us pleasure. We are like infants;
away, or break them, and turn their faces from
you, crying inconsolably.

If you desire an increase of happiness, do not

SOLON AND PISISTRATUS.

look for it, O Pisistratus, in an increase of power. | trolled, but excited, fed, and flattered, by all
Follow the laws of nature on the earth. Spread around, and mostly by their teachers. Do not
the seeds of it far and wide: your crop shall be in
proportion to your industry and liberality. What
you concentrate in yourself, you stifle; you pro-
pagate what you communicate.

Still silent? Who is at the door?
Pisistratus. The boys.

expose them to worse monsters than the young
Athenians were exposed to in the time of Theseus.
Never hath our city, before or since, endured
such calamity, such ignominy. A king, a con-
queror, an injured and exasperated enemy, im-
posed them: shall a citizen, shall a beneficent

Hippias and Hipparchus! you are now the children of Solon, the orphans of Pisistratus. If I have any wisdom, it is the wisdom of experience: it shall cost you nothing from me, from others much. I present to you a fruit which the gods themselves have fenced round, not only from the animals, but from most men; one which I have nurtured and watched day and night for seventy years, reckoning from the time when my letters and duties were first taught me; a lovely, sweet, and wholesome fruit, my children, and which, like the ambrosia of the blessed in Olympus, grows by participation and enjoyment.

Solon. Come, my little fugitives! turn back man, shall a father, devise more cruel and more again hither! come to me, Hippias and Hippar-shameful terms, and admit none but his own offchus! I wish you had entered earlier; that you spring to fulfill them? That monster perhaps might have witnessed my expostulation with your was fabulous. O that these were so! and that father, and that your tender age might have pro- pride, injustice, lust, were tractable to any clue or Weak man! will sighing suffocate them? will duced upon him the effect my declining one has conquerable by any courage, of despotism! failed in. Children, you have lost your patriI do not tell holding down the head confound them? mony. Start not, Pisistratus! them that you have squandered it away: no, I will never teach them irreverence to their parent: aid me, I entreat you, to teach them reverence. Do not, while the thing is recoverable, deprive them of filial love, of a free city, of popular esteem, of congenial sports, of kind confidence, of that which all ages run in pursuit of, equals. Children seek those of the same age, men those of the same condition. Misfortunes come upon all who can best ward them off? not those above us nor those below, but those on a level with ourselves. Tell me, Pisistratus, what arm hath ever raised up the pillow of a dying despot? He hath loosened the bonds of nature in no hour, and least of all in the last, can they be strengthened and drawn together. It is a custom, as you know, for you have not yet forgotten all our customs, to conduct youths with us when we mark the boundaries of our lands, that they may give their testimony on any suit about them in time to Unfortunate boys! their testimony can not be received: the landmarks are removed from their own inheritance by their own father. Armed men are placed in front of them for ever, and their pleasantest walks throughout life must Who would endure be guarded by armed men. it? one of the hardest things to which the captive, or even the criminal, is condemned. The restraints which everyone would wish away, are eternally about them; those which the best of us require through life, are removed from them on entering it. Their passions not only are uncon-ple than we have done.

come.

..

You receive it attentively and gratefully: your father, who ought to know its value, listens and censure him before you, I blame myself rejects it. I am not angry with him for this; and, if also in his presence. Too frequently have I reI who have so little left me: I am conwhen sorrow peated my admonition: I am throwing my time away suming my heart with sorrow and solicitudes should have ceased. . and from whom? from him principally who will derive no good from it, and will suffer none to flow on others, not even on those the dearest to him. Think, my children, how unwise a man is Solon, how hard a man Pisistratus, how mistaken in both are the Athenians. Study to avoid our errors, to correct our faults, and by simplicity of life, by moderation in your hopes and wishes, to set a purer and (grant it, Heaven!) a more stabile exam

LOUIS XVIII. AND TALLEYRAND.

Louis. M. Talleyrand! in common with all my gance and presumption would incur, the usurper family, all France, all Europe, I entertain the attempted to silence and stifle it with other highest opinion of your abilities and integrity. and far different emotions. Half his cruelties You have convinced me that your heart, throughout the storms of the revolution, leaned constantly toward royalty; and that you permitted and even encouraged the caresses of the usurper, merely that you might strangle the more certainly and the more easily his new-born empire. After this, it is impossible to withhold my confidence from you.

were perpetrated that his vanity might not be wounded: for scorn is superseded by horror. Whenever he committed an action or uttered a sentiment which would render him an object of derision, he instantly gave vent to another which paralysed by its enormous wickedness. He would man alive could deceive your Majesty: the exextirpate a nation to extinguish a smile. No Talleyrand. Conscious of the ridicule his arro-tremely few who would wish to do it, lie under

Since my return to my kingdom I have under-dred pheasant-eggs. I am restored to my throne, gone great indignities from this unreflecting people. One Canova, a sculptor at Rome, visited Paris in the name of the Pope, and in quality of his envoy, and insisted on the cession of those statues and pictures which were brought into France by the French armies. He began to remove them out of the Gallery: I told him I would never give my consent: he replied, he thought it sufficient that he had Wellington's. Therefore, Talleyrand. If the charms of language could the next time Wellington presented himself at | be copied, it would be. But what is intended for the Tuileries, I turned my back upon him before delight may terminate in despair: and there are the whole court. Let the English and their words which, unapproachable by distance and allies be aware, that I owe my restoration not to sublimity, may wither the laurels on the most them, but partly to God and partly to Saint exalted of literary brows. Louis. They and their armies are only brute instruments in the hands of my progenitor and intercessor.