MACAULAY’S NEW ZEALANDER

Evening Star, Issue 17647, 28 April 1921, Page 7

MACAULAY’S NEW ZEALANDER

ANCESTRY OF FAMOUS PASSAGE. No passage in Lord Macaulay's writings (says ‘John o’ London’s "Weekly') is better loiftwn nr more constantly associated with his name than the following, which occurs in Iris review essay on Yon Ranke’s ‘History of the Popes.’ He is writing of the Roman Catholic Cluireh: “ She saw the commencement of all the government-;; and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world, and wo feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of" Mecca." And she may still exist in tmdiminished vigor when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” It was suggested in this journal a week or two ago that this famous vision of the Now Zealander, solitary in a London solitude, was not of Macaulay’s invention. Several correspondents have expressed their surprise at the statement, and have asked, in effect, who did originate the picture. That is not an easy question to answer, but it may be well first to establish the fact that it existed in literature before Lord Macaulay was born. Writing to Sir Horace Mann on November 24, 1774 (Macaulay was bom in 1800, and reviewed Walpole’s letters to Sir Horace Mann in 1833), Horace "Walpole wrote

“Don’t tell me that I am grown old and peevish and supercilious—name the geniuses of *774, and I submit. The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides -at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit F.ngland and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.” This suggests strongly that Macaulay only embellished and applied Horace Walpole’s words.

But there is a good deal more to be said. The subject was thrashed out by correspondents of ‘Notes and Queries’ in various years a long time ago, and one of these, Mr C. A. Ward, pointed out that before Horace Walpole wrote his letter a somewhat similar conceit had been produced by a clever French writer, who pictured the future ruins of Versailles. In 1791 appeared Volncy’s once famous but now neglected ‘ Ruins of Empires,’ and in it the following passage: “Perhaps some, traveller hereafter may sit down solitary on tho banks of the Thames, tho Seine, or the Zuyder Zee, and lament tho departed glory of a people now inurnod and their greatness changed into an empty name.’ 1 SHELLEY’S VISION. When Macaulay was twelve years old Airs Barbauld introduced a similar idea into her poem ‘ Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.’ When he was only nineteen, Shellev wrote in his dedication to ‘ Peter Bell t-lio Third’; “In the firm expectation that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns; when St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in tho midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds aaid osiers, and cast tho jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream ; some Transatlantic commentator will bo weighing in tho scales of some new and now ummngincd system of criticism the respective, merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.” All this shows that Macaulay’s vision has so much in common with earlier ones that it cannot be called original, except in its happy rhetoric and striking application. Of course, there can bo no suggestion of plagiarism. Ho adapted an idea which in more or Jess similar shapes had drifted down the stream of literature. As early as 1771 a book doubtfully attributed to Thomas, second Lord Lyttelton, which was not published until 1780, was entitled ‘The .State of England, in a Letter from an American Traveller, Written, from tho Ruinous Portico of St. Paul’s.’ It is evident that Horace Walpole might have seen or liea.nl of this book, and also have seen the passage on Versailles alroadv mentioned as from a French hand.

Tho earliest passage produced in ‘Notes and Queries ’ us the possible origin of Macaulay’s own occurs in tho ‘ London Magazine ’ for July, 1745 ,iu a satirical essay entitled ‘Humorous Thoughts on the "Removal of the .Seat of Empire and Commerce,’ ok. This contains the following paragraph: “When I have been indulging this thought I have in imagination seen the Britons of some future century walking by tho banks of the Thames, then overgrown with weeds. . . . Tho father points to his son where stood St. Paul’s, the Monument, the Bank, the Mansion House, and other places of distinction.” IN ANCIENT LITERATURE. Beyond all verbal resemblances is the broad idea, which, in its very nature, must bo as old as eld. One ‘ Notes and Queries ’ correspondent bring forwards a passage in a letter of Sulpicius to Cicero, in which he describes himself, on his return from Asia, as sailing from /Egina; “ Behind me lay ASgiua, before mo Megara; on my right I saw Piraeus, and on my left- Corinth. These cities, once so flourishing and magnificent, now presented nothing to ray view but a sad spectacle of desolation.”

Yet another suggests confidently that tho "true origin is to be found in fhe 26th chapter of Ezekiel, written four centuries E.c., in which the prophet, denouncing Tyre, has words like these: — “ And they shall destroy the walls of Tyre, and break down her towers; I will also scrape her dust from her and make her like the top of a rock. It shall be a place for the spreading of nets in tho midst of the sea. . . . And they shall

take up a lamentation for thee, and say to thee, ‘How art thou destroyed that wast inhabited of seafaring men, the renowned city, whfch was strong in tho sea, she and her inhabitants, which cause their terror to be on all that haunt it.’ ”