Dialogues of the Dead
105 pages
English

Dialogues of the Dead

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105 pages
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Dialogues of the Dead, by Lord Lyttelton
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Dialogues of the Dead, by Lord Lyttelton, Edited by Henry Morley
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Dialogues of the Dead
Author: Lord Lyttelton Editor: Henry Morley Release Date: February 3, 2006 Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) [eBook #17667]
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD***
Transcribed from the 1889 Cassell & Company edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD.
BY
LORD LYTTELTON. CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED: LONDON , PARIS , NEW YORK & MELBOURNE . 1889.
INTRODUCTION.
p. 5
George, Lord Lyttelton, was born in 1709, at Hagley, in Worcestershire. He was educated at Eton and at Christchurch, Oxford, entered Parliament, became a Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1757 he withdrew from politics, was raised to the peerage, and spent the last eighteen years of his life in lettered ease. In 1760 Lord Lyttelton first published these “Dialogues of the Dead,” which were revised for a fourth edition in 1765, and in 1767 he published in four volumes a “History of the Life of King Henry the Second and of the Age in which he Lived,” a work upon which he ...

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Publié le 08 décembre 2010
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Dialogues of the Dead, by Lord Lyttelton
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Dialogues of the Dead, by Lord Lyttelton,
Edited by Henry Morley
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Dialogues of the Dead
Author: Lord Lyttelton
Editor: Henry Morley
Release Date: February 3, 2006 [eBook #17667]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD***
Transcribed from the 1889 Cassell & Company edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD.
by
LORD LYTTELTON.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK & MELBOURNE.
1889.
p. 5INTRODUCTION.
George, Lord Lyttelton, was born in 1709, at Hagley, in Worcestershire. He
was educated at Eton and at Christchurch, Oxford, entered Parliament, becamea Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1757 he withdrew
from politics, was raised to the peerage, and spent the last eighteen years of his
life in lettered ease. In 1760 Lord Lyttelton first published these “Dialogues of
the Dead,” which were revised for a fourth edition in 1765, and in 1767 he
published in four volumes a “History of the Life of King Henry the Second and
of the Age in which he Lived,” a work upon which he had been busy for thirty
years. He began it not long after he had published, at the age of twenty-six, his
“Letters from a Persian in England to his Friend at Ispahan.” If we go farther
back we find George Lyttelton, aged twenty-three, beginning his life in literature
as a poet, with four eclogues on “The Progress of Love.”
To the last Lord Lyttelton was poet enough to feel true fellowship with poets of
p. 6his day. He loved good literature, and his own works show that he knew it. He
counted Henry Fielding among his friends; he was a friend and helper to James
Thomson, the author of “The Seasons;” and when acting as secretary to the
king’s son, Frederick, Prince of Wales (who held a little court of his own, in
which there was much said about liberty), his friendship brought Thomson and
Mallet together in work on a masque for the Prince and Princess, which
included the song of “Rule Britannia.”
Before Lord Lyttelton followed their example, “Dialogues of the Dead” had been
written by Lucian, and by Fenelon, and by Fontenelle; and in our time they
have been written by Walter Savage Landor. This half-dramatic plan of
presenting a man’s own thoughts upon the life of man and characters of men,
and on the issues of men’s characters in shaping life, is a way of essay writing
pleasant alike to the writer and the reader. Lord Lyttelton was at his best in it.
The form of writing obliged him to work with a lighter touch than he used when
he sought to maintain the dignity of history by the style of his “History of Henry
p. 7II.” His calm liberality of mind enters into the discussion of many topics. His
truths are old, but there are no real truths of human life and conduct, worth
anything at all, that are of yesterday. Human love itself is called “the old, old
story;” but do we therefore cease from loving, or from finding such ways as we
can of saying that we love. Dr. Johnson was not at his wisest when he found
fault with Lord Lyttelton because, in his “Dialogues of the Dead,” “that man sat
down to write a book, to tell the world what the world had all his life been telling
him.” This was exactly what he wished to do. In the Preface to his revised
edition Lord Lyttelton said, “Sometimes a new dress may render an old truth
more pleasing to those whom the mere love of novelty betrays into error, as it
frequently does not only the wits, but the sages of these days. Indeed, one of
the best services that could now be done to mankind by any good writer would
be the bringing them back to common sense, from which the desire of shining
by extraordinary notions has seduced great numbers, to the no small detriment
of morality and of all real knowledge.”
At any rate, we now find it worth while to know what the world had been telling
all his life to an enlightened, highly-educated man, who was an active politician
p. 8in the days of Walpole and of the elder Pitt, who was a friend of Pope’s and of
the best writers of the day, and who in his occasional verse added at least one
line to the household words of English literature when in his warm-hearted
Prologue to Thomson’s play of Coriolanus, produced after its writer’s death, he
said of that poet what we may say of Lord Lyttelton himself, that he gave to the
world
“Not one immoral, one corrupted thought,
One line which, dying, he could wish to blot.”
H. M.p. 9DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD.
DIALOGUE I.
Lord Falkland—Mr. Hampden.
Lord Falkland.—Are not you surprised to see me in Elysium, Mr. Hampden?
Mr. Hampden.—I was going to put the same question to your lordship, for
doubtless you thought me a rebel.
Lord Falkland.—And certainly you thought me an apostate from the
Commonwealth, and a supporter of tyranny.
Mr. Hampden.—I own I did, and I don’t wonder at the severity of your thoughts
about me. The heat of the times deprived us both of our natural candour. Yet I
will confess to you here, that, before I died, I began to see in our party enough
to justify your apprehensions that the civil war, which we had entered into from
generous motives, from a laudable desire to preserve our free constitution,
would end very unhappily, and perhaps, in the issue, destroy that constitution,
even by the arms of those who pretended to be most zealous for it.
Lord Falkland.—And I will as frankly own to you that I saw, in the court and
camp of the king, so much to alarm me for the liberty of my country, if our arms
were successful, that I dreaded a victory little less than I did a defeat, and had
nothing in my mouth but the word peace, which I constantly repeated with
passionate fondness, in every council at which I was called to assist.
Mr. Hampden.—I wished for peace too, as ardently as your lordship, but I saw
no hopes of it. The insincerity of the king and the influence of the queen made
p. 10it impossible to trust to his promises and declarations. Nay, what reliance could
we reasonably have upon laws designed to limit and restrain the power of the
Crown, after he had violated the Bill of Rights, obtained with such difficulty, and
containing so clear an assertion of the privileges which had been in dispute? If
his conscience would allow him to break an Act of Parliament, made to
determine the bounds of the royal prerogative, because he thought that the
royal prerogative could have no bounds, what legal ties could bind a
conscience so prejudiced? or what effectual security could his people obtain
against the obstinate malignity of such an opinion, but entirely taking from him
the power of the sword, and enabling themselves to defend the laws he had
passed?
Lord Falkland.—There is evidently too much truth in what you have said. But
by taking from the king the power of the sword, you in reality took all power. It
was converting the government into a democracy; and if he had submitted to it,
he would only have preserved the name of a king. The sceptre would have
been held by those who had the sword; or we must have lived in a state of
perpetual anarchy, without any force or balance in the government; a state
which could not have lasted long, but would have ended in a republic or in
absolute dominion.
Mr. Hampden.—Your reasoning seems unanswerable. But what could we do?
Let Dr. Laud and those other court divines, who directed the king’s conscience,
and fixed in it such principles as made him unfit to govern a limited monarchy—
though with many good qualities, and some great ones—let them, I say, answerfor all the mischiefs they brought upon him and the nation.
Lord Falkland.—They were indeed much to blame; but those principles had
gained ground before their times, and seemed the principles of our Church, in
opposition to the Jesuits, who had certainly gone too far in the other extreme.
p. 11Mr. Hampden.—It is a disgrace to our Church to have taken up such opinions;
and I will venture to prophesy that our clergy in future times must renounce
them, or they will be turned against them by those who mean their destruction.
Suppose a Popish king on the throne, will the clergy adhere to passive
obedience and non-resistance? If they do, they deliver up their religion to
Rome; if they do not, their practice will confute their own doctrines.
Lord Falkland.—Nature, sir, will in the end be sure to set right whatever opinion
contradicts her great laws, let who will be the teacher. But, indeed, the more I
reflect on those miserable times in which we both lived, the more I esteem it a
favour of Providence to us that we were cut off so soon. The most grievous
misfortune that can befall a virtuous man is to be in such a stat

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