now the "deep solitudes and awful cells" in our national gallery. Our
literary men of eminence are happily more numerous than the political
or the warlike, or both together. There is only one class of them
which might be advantageously excluded, namely, the theological; and
my reasons are these. First, their great talents were chiefly employed
on controversy; secondly, and consequently, their images would excite
dogmatical discord. Every sect of the Anglican Church, and every
class of dissenters, complaining of undue preferences. Painture and
sculpture lived in the midst of corruption, lived throughout it, and
seemed indeed to draw vitality from it, as flowers the most delicate
from noxious air; but they collapsed at the searching breath of free
inquiry, and could not abide persecution. The torch of Philosophy
never kindled the suffocating fagot, under whose smoke Theology was
mistaken for Religion. Theology had, until now, been speculative
and quiescent: she abandoned to Philosophy these humbler qualities:
instead of allaying and dissipating, as Philosophy had always done,
she excited and she directed animosities. Oriental in her parentage,
and keeping up her wide connections in that country, she acquired
there all the artifices most necessary to the furtherance of her
designs: among the rest was ventriloquism, which she quite perfected,
making her words seem to sound from above and from below and from
every side around. Ultimately, when men had fallen on their faces at
this miracle, she assumed the supreme power. Kings were her lackeys,
and nations the dust under her palfrey's hoof. By her sentence Truth
was gagged, scourged, branded, cast down on the earth in manacles; and
Fortitude, who had stood at Truth's side, was fastened with nails and
pulleys to the stake. I would not revive by any images, in the abode
of the graceful and the gentle Arts, these sorrowful reminiscences.
The vicissitudes of the world appear to be bringing round again the
spectral Past. Let us place great men between it and ourselves: they