to pieces this conjectural assertion, and accordingly insists with his wonted force that so far from being a Christian, Josephus was not even a Jew, in any conscientious or religious sense-that he had never taken the first step in the direction of Christianity, but was, as many other Jews were in that age, essentially a Pagan; as little impressed with the true nature of the God whom his country worshipped, with his ineffable purity and holiness, as any idolatrous Athenian whatsoever. On the whole, therefore, Josephus, as an historian, is to be viewed, according to De Quincey, as under a perpetual surveillance from what may be called the police of history-liable to suspicion as one who had a frequent interest in falsehood, in order to screen himself. "Nothing shows the crooked conduct of Josephus so much as the utter perplexity, the mere labyrinth of doubts, in which he has involved the capital features of the last Jewish war.' "He durst not, his relentless castigator contends, have told, even had he known-which, by his critic's hypothesis as to the Christian character of the Essenes, he did not-what was the ostensible ground alleged for the war. "He must have given a Roman, an ex parte statement, at any rate; and let that consideration never be lost sight of in taking his evidence. He might blame a particular Roman, such as Gessius Florus, because he found that Romans themselves condemned him. He might vaunt his veracity and his mappηota in a little corner of the general story; but durst he speak plainly on the broad field of Judæan politics? Not for his life. Or, had the Roman magnanimity taken off his shackles, what became of his court favour and preferment, in case he spoke freely of Roman policy as a system?" The zealots who held out to the last, in the beleaguered city, were odious in person, in principle, in policy, in everything, to a man of so diverse a temperament as this so-called Pharisee. He could, Pharisee-like, thank Heaven (and the Romans) that he was not as these other men were. And when he discussed in history their doings and darings-their pertinacity in patriotism, after his once demonstrative patriotism was gone to the dogs (of Gentiles) their persistent defiance of the world conquerors who came to defile the holy and beautiful city where their fathers worshipped in prosperity, and towards which they worshipped in adversity and exile,— be sure that he who so transforms the Maccabees* that we scarcely recognise them, would colour after his own heart the heroic, if also turbulent and impracticable men who yet loved the hill of Sion, after Josephus had found metal more attractive in the seven hills of Rome, and who still fought for her temple and would fight to the death, long after he had cast in his lot with the foe, and thought it no shame to find a shelter and a refuge in the abomination of desolation itself. But with all our abuse of the Romanised Hebrew, let us keep in mind * Well may M. Chasles call it a curieuse étude, the transformation undergone by the two Books of the Maccabees in the penmanship of Josephus. These intensely Jewish warriors are changed into Stoics of heroic cast. They show not a trace of that indomitable attachment to Jewish manners which forms the essence of the original record. Josephus thoroughly effaces their unconquerable spirit of fanaticism, in order to exhibit nothing beyond moral strength under physical torture, and thus give scope to declamatory comments in the true Pagan tone. We listen to expositions in the style of Seneca, of Cicero, of Carneades. But the Israelite-the most bigoted of exclusionists, whose divine right it is to be bigoted, whose incumbent duty it is to be exclusive-where is he? 49 the debt we owe him for his narrative-whatever may be its imperfections, omissions, or misrepresentations of the last act in the great Tragedy of Judæa Capta. A theme to inspire the coldest blooded of penmen, recreant though you call him, or miscreant,* or what you will! A narrative which the foremost of those who pronounce "Josephus" dull reading, in effect unreadable, must surely except from such a censure. Readers of various tastes, and of clearly distinct orders of mind, certainly do own to finding Josephus a dry author. Such Madame de Grignan seems to have accounted him-judging by the quasi remonstrance in one of her mother's renowned epistles, wherein the Sévigné tells the Grignan, apropos of readings for November nights, that it would really be an ineffaceable disgrace not to read through Josephus-to stop short, stick fast, or break down, in that toilsome task. Ce serait une honte dont vous ne pourriez pas vous laver, de ne pas finir Josèphe.† Hélas, continues madame mère, if you knew what I have got to finish, and what are the sufferings I endure from the style of my Jesuit author (Maimbourg), you would bless your stars and think it luxury to have such a beau livre to finish as Josèphe !-One surmises, however, that the elder lady suffered not much more from the Jesuit, than did the younger‡ from the Jew.§ Cowper in one of his Olney letters (1783), descriptive of his November nights' entertainment, thus expresses his opinion of the historian : "L'Estrange's 'Josephus' has lately furnished us with evening lectures; How but the historian is so tediously circumstantial, and the translator so insupportably coarse and vulgar, that we are all three weary of him. would Tacitus have shone upon such a subject, great master as he was of the art of description, concise without obscurity, and affecting without being poetical! But so it was ordered, and for wise reasons no doubt, * Entering upon the subject of Josephus's denial of the aggressive antipolytheism of the Jewish religion, Mr. de Quincey exclaims: "Hitherto Josephus is only an apostate, only a traitor, only a libeller, only a false-witness, only a liar; and as to his Jewish faith, only perhaps a coward, only perhaps a heretic. But now he will reveal himself (in the literal sense of that word) a miscreant; one who does not merely go astray in his faith, as all of us may do at times, but pollutes his faith by foul adulterations, or undermines it by knocking away its props-a misbeliever, not in the sense of a heterodox believer, who errs as to some point in the superstructure, but as one who unsettles the foundations-the eternal substructions. In one short sentence, Josephus is not ashamed to wrench out the keystone from the great arch of Judaism; so far as a feeble apostate's force will go, he unlocks the whole cohesion and security of that monumental faith upon which, as its basis and plinth, is the starry-pointing' column of our Christianity. He delivers it to the Romans, as sound Pharisaic doctrine, that God had enjoined upon the Jews the duty of respectful homage to all epichorial or national deities -to all idols, that is to say, provided their rank were attested by a suitable Does the audacity of man present us with such number of worshippers.. another instance of perfidious miscreancy? God the Jehovah anxious for the honour of Jupiter and Mercury! God the Father of light and truth, zealous on behalf of those lying deities, whose service is everywhere described as 'whoredom and adultery!" · † Lettres de Mme. de Sévigné, 3 Nov., 1675. And yet, in a letter dated only ten days later, we read: "Je vous remercie du goût que vous avez pour Joseph [sic]; n'est-il pas vrai que c'est la plus belle histoire du monde ?" (Ibid. Nov. 13.) Was Madame de Grignan then a real admirer, after all, or only, to please her mother, a piously fraudulent pretender? § A fortnight later still, for example, we find Madame Mère returning to the charge: "Ne lisez-vous pas toujours Josèphe? prenez-courage, ma fille, et finissez miraculeusement cette histoire." (Ibid. Dec. 1.) E 2 that the greatest calamities any people ever suffered, and an accomplishment of one of the most signal prophecies in the Scripture, should be recorded by one of the worst writers. The man was a temporiser too, and courted the favour of his Roman masters at the expense of his own creed; or else an infidel, and absolutely disbelieved it. You will think me very difficult to please: I quarrel with Josephus for the want of elegance, and with some of our modern historians for having too much. With him, for running right forward like a gazette, without stopping to make a single observation by the way; and with them for pretending to delineate characters that existed two thousand years ago, and to discover the motives by which they were influenced with the same precision as if they had been their contemporaries." Charles Lamb, again, condemns "the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew)" to the limbo of Unreadable Books. On the other hand, Robert Southey, one of Cowper's biographers, and of Lamb's most trusty friends, found Josephus the best of good reading before he was in his teens, and was excited by Josephus to some of the earliest and most ambitious of his many early and ambitious "heroic epistles in rhyme."‡ We may object to the dry circumstantiality of Josephus, or else to his impassive chilliness, or to his rhetorical ornamentation and his laboured endeavours at effect; but in crises at least of his chronicle, his subject asserts its own stirring power, and moves the reader, however unmoved the writer. The most artistic of narrators, the most dramatic, picturesque, and profoundly earnest, may be searched in vain for what surpasses in the sublime§ that recital of the signs and wonders which marked the closing scene of all-when the gates of the Temple were flung open by no human hands, and the thunder of no human voice resounded from the Holy of Holies, to announce the ruin of an infatuated people, and the departure of a long-forbearing God. * Cowper to the Rev. Wm. Unwin, Nov. 24, 1783. "I have no repugnance. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything which I call a book. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such. "In this catalogue of books which are no books-biblia a-biblia-I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards, bound and lettered on the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large: the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and generally, all those volumes which no gentleman's library should be without:' the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding." -Essays of Elia: "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading." In his twelfth year Southey became possessor of the "whole works of Josephus, taken in by me," he says, "with my pocket-money in threescore sixpenny numbers," and still in good condition, and held in affectionate remembrance, when he was writing his Autobiography, in the fall of life. In his thirteenth year Southey wrote an "heroic epistle in rhyme," from Alexander to his father Herod, "a subject," he tells John May, "with which Josephus supplied me."-Life of Southey, vol. i. pp. 117, 119. That once celebrated scholar, Mr. Mathias, who gained a name by being anonymous, thus estimates "that wonderful section" in the seventh book of the Jewish War: "The Historian, in some parts of it, is scarcely inferior in spirit, language, and sublimity, to Eschylus himself."-The Pursuits of Literature, Bk. IV. 1. 473, notes. THE PLANTER'S DAUGHTER. A WEST INDIAN TALE. BY MRS. BUSHBY. I. The heavens are red with wild devouring fire, CHAPMAN'S Barbadoes. It was a lovely West Indian evening; the tropical sun had set in all its splendour, and the gorgeous clouds of crimson and gold, which canopied the western horizon, had gradually melted into the softest blue. The evening star reflected a long line of sparkling light over the dancing waters of the Atlantic Ocean, and the clear moon had just risen above the distant hills, tingeing with a silvery hue the waving branches of the graceful cocoa-nut trees. The din and the heat of day were past; the plaintive cooing of the mountain dove might now be heard, and the sighing of the wind through the rustling canes "made music to the lonely ear.' Sweet odours came wafted on the cooling breeze from hundreds of wild aromatic shrubs; and the brilliant fire-flies glanced their ruby light in many a mazy round. It was the voluptuous hour which the black inhabitants of the West India Islands dedicate to unmixed, undisturbed enjoyment. Here, might be seen groups of negroes dancing to the sound of the sprightly violin, the tambourine, or their favourite banja; while the satirical words of the songs, screamed by the women, and the constant accompaniment of clapping of hands, added to the general hilarity and noise, for, with negroes, noise is indispensable, whether to mirth, sorrow, or anger. There, were parties lounging almost at full length on the little platforms before the doors of their houses, enjoying in its utmost luxury il dolce far niente, or engaged in smoking their long tobacco-pipes, while clouds of smoke rolled lazily from above their heads. Some of the women might be observed more actively engaged in "boiling pot"-viz. preparing in the open air a supper of no unsavoury viands for themselves, their husbands, and their children, whilst the latter were generally to be seen munching huge "junks" of sugar-cane, or roasted Indian corn. It was at this idle, yet busy hour, about forty years ago, before the emancipation of the negroes in the West Indies had taken place, that, on a plantation called Orange Valley, a number of negroes were assembled in a ruin at a remote part of the estate, where the now dismantled dwelling of a former proprietor had stood. The house had been blown down in one of those dreadful hurricanes which so often devastate the blooming islands of the West. It had never been rebuilt, because its situation, at the extremity of a long gully, and at the foot of a semicircle of hills, was thought to be too much exposed to the violence of the winds. The rank grass now grew in its unroofed halls, and few cared to approach "de old-time house," for it was supposed to have become the abode of a wehr-wolf and the haunt of jumbees. Its grey walls, however, now afforded concealment to a number of negroes who had met at the request of one in authority among them. They had met to hear lessons of rebellion, and rapine, and murder preached to them from the lips of a white man, who professed to be a minister of religion! But the Reverend Jabez Judd, as he chose to dub and to style himself, had no real claim to the character he had assumed. He had never studied for the Church, he had never been ordained, nor had he ever ascended a pulpit in his life, in his own country. He had been brought up, it is true, among a strict sect of Dissenters, amidst whom his fathera respectable carpenter-had been a shining light; but he was a very unworthy member of the sect to whom he nominally belonged, and from his bad disposition he had been a "a thorn in the flesh," as they termed it, to his parents from his childhood. His real name was Benjamin Budd, and he had been a journeyman farrier in the suburbs of a seaport town in England. He was a quarrelsome, ill-tempered fellow, who delighted in making mischief whenever he could. At last he got into a serious scrape from his violent temper -he killed one of his fellow-workmen; not exactly from any predetermination to commit murder, but in a fit of ungovernable fury; and as he had often been heard to threaten the man whom he disliked that "he would do for him," the jury would very probably not have given a verdict in his favour, therefore he thought it best to abscond at once. Fortunately for him a ship was about to sail from the seaport close to which he lived for the West Indies, and knowing the second mate, he managed to get quietly on board. He was able to pay for a steerage passage, and he gave himself out as a holy person, who had had "a call" to go as a missionary to enlighten the black heathens in the benighted West India Islands. He bought a Bible from one of the sailors, and stole two or three tracts from a serious fellow-passenger; with this small stock in trade, and a large stock of impudence, he commenced his career as a missionary, to teach and to preach the word of life to "the unsuffocated Genteels," as a native apostle denominated "the unenlightened Gentiles," meaning the lower class negroes. The Reverend Jabez Judd was soon on friendly terms with the abovementioned native apostle, the two worthies agreed to work together, and it was very edifying to see the white man aud the coloured man-regardless of their different pedigrees and skins-uniting in their efforts to bring the poor negroes into the odour of sanctity as far as was possible. The Reverend Jabez was very efficient in thundering about hell-fire and eternal punishment; while the blander Dr. Obadiah Stephens, or as the people called him, Docta Tiefhens* (he did steal poultry sometimes), took the opposite side, the higher, at all events, the more pleasing ground, and painted the joys of Paradise in a fashion alluring enough to his hearers, certainly, but savouring more of Mahometanism than of Christianity. * Negroes generally make sad havoc among names; even those of their partisans par excellence-Wilberforce, Macaulay, and Fowell Buxton, which surely deserve reverential precision from them, are rendered absolutely ludicrous by the absurd manner in which they are pronounced, when mentioned at all. |