Poetess Archive: Anna Barbauld's Prose Works
	"Dialogue in the Shades" (1773)

A Dialogue in the Shades

1.          Clio. -- There is no help for it, -- they must go. The river Lethe is here at hand; I shall tear them off and throw them into the stream.

2.          Mercury. -- Illustrious daughter of Mnemosyne, Clio! the most respected of the Muses, -- you seem disturbed. What is it that brings us the honour of a visit from you in these infernal regions?

3.          Clio. -- You are a god of expedients, Mercury; I want to consult you. I am oppressed with the continually increasing demands upon me: I have had more business for these last twenty years than I have often had for two centuries; and if I had, as old Homer says, "a throat of brass and adamantine lungs," I could never get through it. And what did he want this throat of brass for? for a paltry list of ships, canoes rather, which would be laughed at in the Admiralty Office of London. But I must inform you, Mercury, that my roll is so full, and I have so many applications which cannot in decency be refused, that I see no other way than striking off some hundreds of

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names in order to make room; and I am come to inform the shades of my determination.

4.          Mercury. -- I believe, Clio, you will do right: and as one end of your roll is a little mouldy, no doubt you will begin with that; but the ghosts will raise a great clamour.

5.          Clio. -- I expect no less; but necessity has no law. All the parchment in Pergamus is used up, -- my roll is long enough to reach from earth to heaven; it is grown quite cumbrous; it takes a life, as mortals reckon lives, to unroll it.

6.          Mercury. -- Yet consider, Clio, how many of these have passed a restless life, and encountered all manner of dangers, and bled and died only to be placed upon your list, -- and now to be struck off!

7.          Clio. -- And committed all manner of crimes, you might have added; -- but go they must. Besides, they have been sufficiently recompensed. Have they not been praised, and sung, and admired for some thousands of years? Let them give place to others: What! have they no conscience? no modesty? Would Xerxes, think you, have reason to complain, when his parading expeditions have already procured him above two thousand years of fame, though a Solyman or a Zingis Khan should fill up his place?

8.          Mercury. -- Surely you are not going to blot out Xerxes from your list of names?

9.          Clio. -- I do not say that I am: but that I keep him is more for the sake of his antagonists than his own. And yet their places might be well supplied by the Swiss heroes of Morgarten, or the brave though unsuccessful patriot Aloys Reding. -- But pray what noise is that at the gate?

10.          Mercury. -- A number of the shades, who have received an intimation of your purpose, and are come to remonstrate against it.

11.          Clio. -- In the name of all the gods whom have we here? -- Hercules, Theseus, Jason, Œdipus, Bacchus, Cadmus with a bag of dragon's teeth, and a whole tribe of strange shadowy figures! I shall expect to see the Centaurs and Lapithæ, or Perseus on his flying courser. Away with them; they belong to my sisters, not to me; Melpomene will receive them gladly.

12.          Mercury. -- You forget, Clio, that Bacchus conquered India.

13.          Clio. -- And had horns like Moses, as Vossius is pleased to say. No, Mercury, I will have nothing to do with these; if ever I received them, it was when I was young and credulous. -- As I have said, let my sisters take them; or let them be celebrated in tales for children.

14.          Mercury. -- That will not do, Clio; children in this age read none but wise books: stories of giants and dragons are all written for grown-up children now.

15.          Clio. -- Be that as it may, I shall clear my hands of them, and of a great many more, I do assure you.

16.          Mercury. -- I hope "the tale of Troy divine --!"

17.          Clio. -- Divine let it be, but my share in it is very small; I recollect furnishing the catalogue. -- Mercury, I will tell you the truth. When I was young, my mother (as arrant a gossip as ever breathed) related to me a great number of stories: and as in those days people could not read or write, I had no better authority for what I recorded: but after letters were found out, and now since the noble invention of printing, -- why do you think, Mercury, any one would dare to tell lies in print?

18.          Mercury. -- Sometimes perhaps. I have seen a splendid victory in the gazette of one country dwindle into an honourable retreat in that of another.

19.          Clio. -- In newspapers, very possibly: but with regard to myself, when I have time to consider and lay things together, I assure you you may depend upon me. -- Whom have we in that group which I see indistinctly in a sort of twilight?

20.          Mercury. -- Very renowned personages; Ninus, Sesostris, Semiramis, Cheops who built the largest pyramid.

21.          Clio. -- If Cheops built the largest pyramid, people are welcome to inquire about him at the spot, -- room must be made. As to Semiramis, tell her

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her place shall be filled up by an empress and a conqueror from the shores of the wintry Baltic.

22.          Mercury. -- The renowned Cyrus is approaching with a look of confidence, for he is introduced by a favourite of yours, the elegant Xenophon.

23.          Clio. -- Is that Cyrus? Pray desire him to take off that dress which Xenophon has given him; truly I took him for a Greek philosopher. I fancy queen Tomyris would scarcely recognise him.

24.          Mercury. -- Aspasia hopes, for the honour of her sex, that she shall continue to occupy a place among those you celebrate.

25.          Clio. -- Tell the mistress of Pericles we can spare her without inconvenience: many ladies are to be found in modern times who possess her eloquence and her talents, with the modesty of a vestal; and should a more perfect likeness be required, modern times may furnish that also.

26.          Mercury. -- Here are two figures who approach you with a very dignified air.

27.          Solon and Lycurgus. -- We present ourselves, divine Clio, with confidence. We have no fear that you should strike from your roll the lawgivers of Athens and Sparta.

28.          Clio. -- Most assuredly not. Yet I must inform you that a name higher than either of yours, and a constitution more perfect, is to be found in a vast continent, of the very existence of which you had not the least suspicion.

29.          Mercury. -- I see approaching a person of a no-

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ble and spirited air, if he did not hold his head a little on one side as if his neck were awry.

30.          Alexander. -- Clio, I need not introduce myself; I am, as you well know, the son of Jupiter Ammon, and my arms have reached even to the remote shore of the Indus.

31.          Clio. -- Pray burn your genealogy; and for the rest, suffer me to inform you that the river Indus and the whole peninsula which you scarcely discovered, with sixty millions of inhabitants, is at this moment subject to the dominion of a few merchants in a remote island of the Northern Ocean, the very name of which never reached your ears.

32.          Mercury. -- Here is Empedocles, who threw himself into Ætna merely to be placed upon your roll; and Calanus, who mounted his funeral pile before Alexander, from the same motive.

33.          Clio. -- They have been remembered long enough in all reason: their places may be supplied by the two next madmen who shall throw themselves under the wheels of the chariot of Jaggernaut, -- fanatics are the growth of every age.

34.          Mercury. -- Here is a ghost preparing to address you with a very self-sufficient air: his robe is embroidered with flower-de-luces.

35.          Louis XIV. -- I am persuaded, Clio, you will recognise the immortal man. I have always been a friend and patron of the Muses; my actions are

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well known; all Europe has resounded with my name, -- the terror of other countries, the glory of my own: I am well assured you are not going to strike me off.

36.          Clio. -- To strike you off? certainly not; but to place you many degrees lower in the list; to reduce you from a sun, your favourite emblem, to a star in the galaxy. My sisters have certainly been partial to you: you bought their favour with -- how many livres a year? not much more than a London bookseller will give for a quarto poem. But me you cannot bribe.

37.          Louis. -- But, Clio, you have yourself recorded my exploits; -- the passage of the Rhine, Namur, Flanders, Franche Comté.

38.          Clio. -- O Louis, if you could but guess the extent of the present French empire; -- but no, it could never enter into your imagination.

39.          Louis. -- I rejoice at what you say; I rejoice that my posterity have followed my steps, and improved upon my glory.

40.          Clio. -- Your posterity have had nothing to do with it.

41.          Louis. -- Remember too the urbanity of my character, how hospitably I received the unfortunate James of England, -- England, the natural enemy of France.

42.          Clio. -- Your hospitality has been well returned. Your descendants, driven from their thrones,

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are at this moment supported by the bounty of the nation and king of England.

43.          Louis. -- O Clio, what is it that you tell me! let me hide my diminished head in the deepest umbrage of the grove; let me seek out my dear Maintenon, and tell my beads with her till I forget that I have been either praised or feared.

44.          Clio. -- Comfort yourself, however; your name, like the red letter which marks the holiday, though insignificant in itself, shall still enjoy the honour of designating the age of taste and literature.

45.          Mercury.-- Here is a whole crowd coming, Clio, I can scarcely keep them off with my wand: they have all got notice of your intentions, and the infernal regions are quite in an uproar, -- what is to be done?

46.          Clio. -- I cannot tell; the numbers distract me: to examine their pretensions one by one is impossible; I must strike off half of them at a venture: the rest must make room, -- they must crowd, they must fall into the back-ground; and where I used to write a name all in capitals with letters of gold illuminated, I must put it in small pica. I do assure you, Mercury, I cannot stand the fatigue I undergo, much longer. I am not provided, as you very well know, with either chariot or wings, and I am expected to be in all parts of the globe at once. In the good old times my business lay almost entirely between the Hel-

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lespont and the Pillars of Hercules, with sometimes an excursion to the mouths (then seven) of the Nile, or the banks of the Euphrates. But now I am required to be in a hundred places at once; I am called from Jena to Austerlitz, from Cape Trafalgar to Aboukir, and from the thames to the Ganges and Burampooter; besides a whole continent, a world by itself, fresh and vigorous, which I foresee will find me abundance of employment.

47.          Mercury. -- Truly I believe so; I am afraid the old leaven is working in the new world.

48.          Clio. -- I am puzzled at this moment how to give the account, which always is expected of me, of the august sovereigns of Europe.

49.          Mercury. -- How so?

50.          Clio. -- I do not know where to find them; they are most of them upon their travels.

51.          Mercury. -- You must have been very much employed in the French revolution.

52.          Clio. -- Continually; the actors in the scene suceeded one another with such rapidity, that the hero of today was forgotten on the morrow. Necker, Mirabeau, Dumourier, La Fayette, appeared successively like pictures in a magic lanthern -- shown for a moment and then withdrawn: and now the space is filled by one tremendous gigantic figure, that throws his broad shadow over half the globe.

53.          Mercury. -- The ambition of Napoleon has indeed procured you much employment.

54.          Clio. -- Employment! There is not a goddess so harassed as I am; my sisters lead quite idle lives in comparison. Melpomene has in a manner slept through the last half-century, except when now and then she dictated to a certain favourite nymph. Urania, indeed, has employed herself with Herschel in counting the stars; but her task is less than mine. Here am I expected to calculate how many hundred thousands of rational beings cut one another's throats at Austerlitz, and to take the tale of two hundred and thirteen thousand human bodies and ninety-five thousand horses, that lie stiff, frozen and unburied on the banks of the Berecina; -- and do you think, Mercury, this can be a pleasant employment?

55.          Mercury. -- I have had a great increase of employment myself lately, on account of the multitude of shades I have been obliged to convey; and poor old Charon is almost laid up with the rheumatism: we used to have a holiday comparatively during the winter months; but of late, winter and summer I have observed are much alike to heroes.

56.          Clio. -- I wish to Jupiter I could resign my office! Son of Maia, I declare to you I am sick of the horrors I record; I am sick of man-

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kind. For above these three thousand years have I been warning them and reading lessons to them, and they will not mend: Robespierre was as cruel as Sylla, and Napoleon has no more moderation than Pyrrhus. The human frame, of curious texture, delicately formed, feeling, and irritable by the least annoyance, with face erect and animated with Promethean fire, they wound, they lacerate, they mutilate with most perverted ingenuity. -- I will go and record the actions of the tigers of Africa; in them such fierceness is natural -- Nay, the human race will be exterminated if this work of destruction goes on much longer.

57.          Mercury. -- With regard to that matter, Clio, I can set your heart at rest. A great philosopher has lately discovered that the world is in imminent danger of being over-peopled, and that if twenty or forty thousand men could not be persuaded every now and then to stand and be shot at, we should be forced to eat one another. This discovery has had a wonderful effect in quieting tender consciences. The calculation is very simple, any schoolboy will explain it to you.

58.          Clio. -- O what a number of fertile plains and green savannahs, and tracts covered with trees of beautiful foliage, have never yet been pressed by human footsteps! My friend Swift's project of eat-

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ing children was not so cruel as these bloody and lavish sacrifices to Mars, the most savage of all the gods.

59.          Mercury. -- You forget yourself, Clio; Mars is not worshiped now in Christian Europe.

60.          Clio. -- By Jupiter but he is! Have I not seen the bloody and torn banners, with martial music and military procession, brought into the temple, -- and whose temple, thinkest thou? and to whom have thanks been given on both sides, amidst smoking towns and wasted fields, after the destruction of man and devastation of the fair face of nature! -- And Mercury, god of wealth and frauds, you have your temple too, though your name is not inscribed there.

61.          Mercury. -- I am afraid men will always love wealth.

62.          Clio. -- O if I had to record only such pure names as a Washington or a Howard!

63.          Mercury. -- It would be very gratifying, certainly; but then, Clio, you would have very little to do, and might almost as well burn your roll.