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WHEN a man sits down to
write his own life with the view of giving it to the public, however
well known to the public he may be, or however highly recommended by
rank, or station, or mental abilities, he can after all scarcely, we
think, escape from the rather ugly charges of egotism or
self-conceit. Hume and Gibbon were unquestionably great men. So the
"Iearned of this world" pronounced them to be. But "The Author's
Memoirs of Himself " by the one, and "My Own Life" by the other,
evince, particularly the former, a degree of self-complacency and
arrogance which all the literary merit of their works can scarcely,
if at all, redeem. How much more then, and heavily, does the charge
fasten upon one who, to the public, is nothing, and who has
notwithstanding taken up the doughty resolution of filling this
volume with memorabilia of his grandfather, his father, and himself.
Ajax had to present in battle against the sword's point of his
adversary a shield of seven folds. Against the charge
above-mentioned the writer of these memoirs has to present a shield
only of two folds, which he thinks will be fully sufficient to
defend him. The first is, that he writes, not with the most distant
intention to publish these memoirs himself, or not with the
slightest desire or expectation that they should be published when
the hand that now writes them shall be stiff in death—when the mind
that indites them shall be a disembodied spirit in eternity. Then
another fold in his shield is, that he records these family
reminiscences, not to tell the public what he or his were, but to
tell it to himself. There is something peculiarly solemn and
edifying —something which betters a man's spirit—in the truly
believing consciousness, not only that we ourselves are but
"pilgrims on earth," but that we are so "even as all our fathers
also have been." Their race is run; their course—involving the
every-day duties, occurrences, crosses, businesses, joys, and
sorrows, in short, all the "lights and shadows" of an earthly
existence—is finished, never again to be begun. They are gone—never
to return—and where am I? Unceasingly following them; like them, now
conscious of things earthly; like them, at last to know eternity !
To look back on the years they spent on earth, to recount the
incidents of their humble, but I trust in some measure useful,
lives, to connect them with my own, and to view the whole in the
spirit and temper of a pilgrim, are to me sufficiently good reasons
why I should write these memoirs.
DOND. SAGE.
MANSE of RESOLIS,
25th. May, 1840. |
