No More Learning

The Dragon which guarded the
golden apples of the Hesperides, and the ship Argo complete the number
of the constellations mentioned by Camoens. If our author has blended
the appearances of heaven with those of the painted artificial sphere,
it is in the manner of the classics. Ovid, in particular, thus describes
the heavens, in the second book of his Metamorphoses.

[631] _Such are their laws impress'd by God's dread will. _--Though a
modern narrative of gallant adventures by no means requires the
supposition of a particular Providence, that supposition, however, is
absolutely necessary to the grandeur of an epic poem. The great examples
of Homer and Virgil prove it; and Camoens understood and felt its force.
While his fleet combat all the horrors of unploughed oceans, we do not
view his heroes as idle wanderers; the care of heaven gives their voyage
the greatest importance. When GAMA falls on his knees and spreads his
hands to heaven on the discovery of India, we are presented with a
figure infinitely more noble than that of the most successful conqueror
who is supposed to act under the influence of fatalism or chance. The
human mind is conscious of its own weakness. It expects an elevation in
poetry, and demands a degree of importance superior to the caprices of
unmeaning accident. The poetical reader cannot admire the hero who is
subject to such blind fortuity. He appears to us with an abject,
uninteresting littleness. Our poetical ideas of permanent greatness
demand a GAMA, a hero whose enterprises and whose person interest the
care of Heaven and the happiness of his people. Nor must this
supposition be confined merely to the machinery. The reason why it
pleases, also requires, that the supposition should be uniform
throughout the whole poem.
Virgil, by dismissing Eneas through the ivory
gate of Elysium, has hinted that all his pictures of a future state were
merely dreams, and has thus destroyed the highest merit of the
compliment to his patron Augustus. But Camoens has certainly been more
happy. A fair opportunity offered itself to indulge the opinions of
Lucretius and the Academic Grove; but Camoens, in ascribing the
government of the universe to the will of God, has not only preserved
the philosophy of his poem perfectly uniform, but has also shown that
the Peripatetic system is, in this instance, exactly conformable to the
Newtonian.

Though the Author of nature has placed man in a state of moral agency,
and made his happiness and misery to depend upon it, and though every
page of human history is stained with the tears of injured innocence and
the triumphs of guilt, with miseries which must affect a moral, or
thinking being, yet we have been told, that God perceiveth it not, and
that what mortals call moral evil vanishes from before His more perfect
sight. Thus the appeal of injured innocence, and the tear of bleeding
virtue fall unregarded, unworthy of the attention of the Deity. {*} Yet,
with what raptures do these philosophers behold the infinite wisdom and
care of Beelzebub, their god of flies, in the admirable and various
provision he has made for the preservation of the eggs of vermin, and
the generation of maggots. {**}

Much more might be said in proof that our poet's philosophy does not
altogether deserve ridicule. And those who allow a general, but deny a
particular providence, will, it is hoped, excuse Camoens, on the
consideration, that if we estimate a general moral providence by analogy
of that providence which presides over vegetable and animal nature, a
more particular one cannot possibly be wanted. If a particular
providence, however, is still denied, another consideration obtrudes
itself; if one pang of a moral agent is unregarded, one tear of injured
innocence left to fall unpitied by the Deity, if _Ludit in humanis
Divina potentia rebus_, the consequence is, that the human conception
can form an idea of a much better God. And it may modestly be presumed
we may hazard the laugh of the wisest philosopher, and without scruple
assert, that it is impossible that a created mind should conceive an
idea of perfection superior to that which is possessed by the Creator
and Author of existence.

{*} Perhaps, like Lucretius, some philosophers think this would be too
much trouble to the Deity. But the idea of trouble to the Divine Nature,
is much the same as another argument of the same philosopher, who having
asserted, that before the creation the gods could not know what seed
would produce, from thence wisely concludes that the world was made by
chance.

{**} Ray, in his Wisdom of God in the Creation (though he did not deny a
Providence), has carried this extravagance to the highest pitch. "To
give life," says he, "is the intention of the creation; and how
wonderful does the goodness of God appear in this, that the death and
putrefaction of one animal is the life of thousands. " So, the misery of
a family on the death of a parent is nothing, for ten thousand maggots
are made happy by it. --O Philosophy, when wilt thou forget the dreams of
thy slumbers in Bedlam!