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We intend to kindle, not to extinguish, curiosity, by this slight sketch of a work, abounding with curious quotations and pleasing disquisitions.
But here I must be brief. I tread on familiar ground, made familiar by all our literature, especially by the most brilliant writer of modern times, though not the greatest philosopher: I mean that great artist and word-painter Macaulay, whose chief excellence is in making clear and interesting and vivid, by a world of illustration and practical good-sense and marvellous erudition, what was obvious to his own objective mind, and obvious also to most other enlightened people not much interested in metaphysical disquisitions.
Wagner's criticisms on music are admirable. Here he expresses his thoughts as plainly as in his compositions. His disquisitions on music as an art and on Beethoven in particular, are always lucid and forcible. He may be misty in his philosophical speculations, but when he speaks on music it is in the authoritative tone of the master, familiar with every phase of his subject.
ATKITSON AND MARTINEAU, "Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development." DR. PRIESTLEY, "Discoveries relating to Vision, Light, and Colors." MR. DUGALD STEWART, "Philosoph. Essays," p. 187. DR. PRIESTLEY, "Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit;" "Free Discussion of the Doctrine of Materialism;" "Correspondence between Dr. Priestley and Dr. Price."
But our peculiar department is confined to actual voyages and travels, and the progress of discovery; and it would both much exceed our proper limits, and would be an entire deviation from our plan of arrangement, to admit lengthened geographical and topographical disquisitions; which, so far as they are at all admissible, must be reserved for the more particular voyages and travels, after those of general discovery have been discussed.
Two bits of writing have come down to give us a glimpse of the boy's mind during these two years of helpless floundering. A detestable practice of the school authorities required the pupils to criticise one another in moral disquisitions. On one occasion the duke gave out the theme: 'Who is the meanest among you? Schiller did his task in Latin distichs which have been preserved.
"Very often some striking poetical turn given to a subject makes it, all at once, clear to our comprehension, even when long and learned disquisitions have failed; and I am acquainted with such an one, written by an anonymous author, and which may please you and you too, Aristarchus. It epitomizes very happily the subject of our discussion.
It would require a greater philosopher and historian than I am to explain the causes of the famous Seven Years' War in which Europe was engaged; and, indeed, its origin has always appeared to me to be so complicated, and the books written about it so amazingly hard to understand, that I have seldom been much wiser at the end of a chapter than at the beginning, and so shall not trouble my reader with any personal disquisitions concerning the matter.
Yet his popularity with that class of readers whom he did not shock by his disquisitions on religions and morals, or make distrustful by his sweeping generalizations and scientific inaccuracies, is due to the fact that his book appeared at the right moment: for the time was really come to make history something more than a chronicle of detached facts and anecdotes.
Among the diplomatic controversies of history, rarely refreshing at best, few have been more drouthy than those once famous disquisitions, and they shall be left to shrivel into the nothingness of the past, so far as is consistent with the absolute necessities of this narrative.
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