The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous ProseLamb, Charles
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The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous Prose
Lamb, Charles
English literature
It is impossible, upon Catholic principles, not to admit the force of
this reasoning; we can only not help smiling (with the writer) at the
simplicity of the gulled editor, swallowing the dregs of Loyola for the
very quintessence of sublimated reason in England at the commencement of
the nineteenth century. We will just, as a contrast, show what we
Protestants (who are a party concerned) thought upon the same subject,
at a period rather nearer to the heroic project in question.
The Gunpowder Treason was the subject which called forth the earliest
specimen which is left us of the pulpit eloquence of Jeremy Taylor. When
he preached the Sermon on that anniversary, which is printed at the end
of the folio edition of his Sermons, he was a young man just commencing
his ministry, under the auspices of Archbishop Laud. From the learning,
and maturest oratory, which it manifests, one should rather have
conjectured it to have proceeded from the same person after he was
ripened by time into a Bishop and Father of the Church.--"And, really,
these _Romano-barbari_ could never pretend to any precedent for an act
so barbarous as theirs. Adramelech, indeed, killed a king, but he spared
the people; Haman would have killed the people, but spared the king; but
that both king and people, princes and judges, branch and rush and root,
should die at once (as if Caligula's wish were actuated, and all England
upon one head), was never known till now, that all the malice of the
world met in this as in a centre. The Sicilian even-song, the matins of
St. Bartholomew, known for the pitiless and damned massacres, were but
[Greek: kapnou skias onar], the dream of the shadow of smoke, if
compared with this great fire. _In tam occupato sæculo fabulas vulgares
nequitia non invenit._ This was a busy age; Herostratus must have
invented a more sublimed malice than the burning of one temple, or not
have been so much as spoke of since the discovery of the powder treason.
But I must make more haste, I shall not else climb the sublimity of this
impiety. Nero was sometimes the _populare odium_, was popularly hated,
and deserved it too, for he slew his master, and his wife, and all his
family, once or twice over,--opened his mother's womb,--fired the city,
laughed at it, slandered the Christians for it; but yet all these were
but _principia malorum_, the very first rudiments of evil. Add, then, to
these, Herod's master-piece at Ramah, as it was deciphered by the tears
and sad threnes of the matrons in an universal mourning for the loss of
their pretty infants; yet this of Herod will prove but an infant
wickedness, and that of Nero the evil but of one city. I would willingly
have found out an example, but see I cannot; should I put into the scale
the extract of all the old tyrants famous in antique stories,--
Bistonii stabulum regis, Busiridis aras,
Antiphatæ mensas, et Taurica regna Thoantis;--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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