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That Journal of Mr Sterling's, published in the Westminster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in the Prolegomena to his edition of the Essays. I heard with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs of William Shakespeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. It is the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's library.
He had taken his Aristotle with a high and noble seriousness; and in the same spirit he had approached his Kant, his Hegel and his Schopenhauer in succession. He was equipped with the most beautiful metaphysical theory of Art, and had himself written certain Prolegomena to Æsthetics. Metaphysics had preyed on Jewdwine like a flame. He was consumed with a passion for unity.
He was persuaded by Cardinal Wiseman to undertake the editorship of a new English version of the Scriptures, which was to be a monument of Catholic scholarship and an everlasting glory to Mother Church. He made elaborate preparations; he collected subscriptions, engaged contributors, and composed a long and learned prolegomena to the work.
These were the laws he had laid down in the Prolegomena to Æsthetics, which Rickman, in the insolence of his genius, had defied. Somehow the life seemed to have departed from those stately propositions, but Jewdwine clung to them in a desperate effort to preserve his critical integrity. He was soothed by the sound of his own voice repeating them.
Prefixed to this book are Prolegomena, in which the author shews that the works of the ancient Pagans are filled with maxims agreeable to the truths taught in Holy Writ. He intended to dedicate this book to the Chancellor Silleri: he had even written the dedication; but his friends, to whom he shewed it, thought he expressed himself with too much warmth against the censurers of his Apology.
Later on he gained fame by his Greek translation of Beccaria's work on crimes and their punishments. This was the first publication in Europe which gave true information on the intellectual and moral conditions of the new Greeks. During the period from 1805-27 he published a collection twenty volumes of old Greek classics, with critical explanations and prolegomena.
I conceive that few further prolegomena are necessary to the understanding of the pages which follow. Before I touched the Italian soil I was, in the eyes of our law, a grown man, sufficiently robust and moderately well-read. I was able to converse adequately in French, tolerably in Italian, had a fair acquaintance with the literatures of those countries, some Latin, a poor stock of Greek.
For in the account which Hafen Slawkenbergius gives the world of his motives and occasions for writing, and spending so many years of his life upon this one work towards the end of his prolegomena, which by-the-bye should have come first but the bookbinder has most injudiciously placed it betwixt the analytical contents of the book, and the book itself he informs his reader, that ever since he had arrived at the age of discernment, and was able to sit down cooly, and consider within himself the true state and condition of man, and distinguish the main end and design of his being; or to shorten my translation, for Slawkenbergius's book is in Latin, and not a little prolix in this passage ever since I understood, quoth Slawkenbergius, any thing or rather what was what and could perceive that the point of long noses had been too loosely handled by all who had gone before; have I Slawkenbergius, felt a strong impulse, with a mighty and unresistible call within me, to gird up myself to this undertaking.
The 'Prolegomena to Ethics' of T.H. Green was a fitting result of his unwearied controversies in defence of the spiritual nature of man and the universe. No one is more worthy than he to be called by the Platonic name a 'friend of ideas, And he was a friend of ideas because he saw their necessity for maintaining and realising the higher capacities of human life.
We may conveniently take as the protagonist of the school the Oxford scholar, Thomas Hill Green, whose "Prolegomena to Ethics" has had, directly and indirectly, a powerful influence upon the minds of the men of our generation. "Good" is that which satisfies some desire.
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