It is certain that, just before the Restoration, he declared to the
Regicides that he would be damned, body and soul, rather than suffer a
hair of their heads to be hurt, and that, just after the Restoration, he
was one of the judges who sentenced them to death. It is certain that he
was a principal member of the most profligate Administration ever known,
and that he was afterwards a principal member oft the most profligate
Opposition ever known. It is certain that, in power, he did not scruple
to violate the great fundamental principle of the Constitution, in order
to exalt the Catholics, and that, out of power, he did not scruple to
violate every principle of justice, in order to destroy them. There were
in that age some honest men, such as William Penn, who valued toleration
so highly that they would willingly have seen it established even by
an illegal exertion of the prerogative. There were many honest men who
dreaded arbitrary power so much that, on account of the alliance between
Popery and arbitrary power, they were disposed to grant no toleration to
Papists. On both those classes we look with indulgence, though we think
both in the wrong. But Shaftesbury belonged to neither class. He united
all that was worst in both. From the misguided friends of toleration
he borrowed their contempt for the Constitution, and from the misguided
friends of civil liberty their contempt for the rights of conscience. We
never can admit that his conduct as a member of the Cabal was redeemed
by his conduct as a leader of Opposition. On the contrary, his life was
such that every part of it, as if by a skilful contrivance, reflects
infamy on every other. We should never have known how abandoned a
prostitute he was in place, if we had not known how desperate an
incendiary he was out of it. To judge of him fairly, we must bear in
mind that the Shaftesbury who, in office, was the chief author of the
Declaration of Indulgence, was the same Shaftesbury who, out of office,
excited and kept up the savage hatred of the rabble of London against
the very class to whom that Declaration of Indulgence was intended to
give illegal relief.

It is amusing to see the excuses that are made for him. We will give two
specimens. It is acknowledged that he was one of the Ministry which made
the alliance with France against Holland, and that this alliance was
most pernicious. What, then, is the defence? Even this, that he betrayed
his master’s counsels to the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, and
tried to rouse all the Protestant powers of Germany to defend the
States. Again, it is acknowledged that he was deeply concerned in the
Declaration of Indulgence, and that his conduct on this occasion was not
only unconstitutional, but quite inconsistent with the course which he
afterwards took respecting the professors of the Catholic faith. What,
then, is the defence? Even this, that he meant only to allure concealed
Papists to avow themselves, and thus to become open marks for the
vengeance of the public. As often as he is charged with one treason,
his advocates vindicate him by confessing two. They had better leave him
where they find him. For him there is no escape upwards. Every outlet
by which he can creep out of his present position, is one which lets
him down into a still lower and fouler depth of infamy. To whitewash
an Ethiopian is a proverbially hopeless attempt; but to whitewash an
Ethiopian by giving him a new coat of blacking is an enterprise more
extraordinary still. That in the course of Shaftesbury’s dishonest and
revengeful opposition to the Court he rendered one or two most useful
services to his country we admit. And he is, we think, fairly entitled,
if that be any glory, to have his name eternally associated with the
Habeas Corpus Act in the same way in which the name of Henry the Eighth
is associated with the reformation of the Church, and that of Jack
Wilkes with the most sacred rights of electors.

While Shaftesbury was still living, his character was elaborately
drawn by two of the greatest writers of the age, by Butler, with
characteristic brilliancy of wit, by Dryden, with even more than
characteristic energy and loftiness, by both with all the inspiration of
hatred. The sparkling illustrations of Butler have been thrown into the
shade by the brighter glory of that gorgeous satiric Muse, who comes
sweeping by in sceptred pall, borrowed from her most august sisters. But
the descriptions well deserve to be compared. The reader will at once
perceive a considerable difference between Butler’s

                        “politician,

               With more beads than a beast in vision,”

and the Achitophel of Dryden. Butler dwells on Shaftesbury’s
unprincipled versatility; on his wonderful and almost instinctive skill
in discerning the approach of a change of fortune; and on the dexterity
with which he extricated himself from the snares in which he left his
associates to perish.

“Our state-artificer foresaw Which way the world began to draw. For as
old sinners have all points O’ th’ compass in their bones and joints,
Can by their pangs and aches find All turns and changes of the wind,
And better than by Napier’s bones Feel in their own the age of moons:
So guilty sinners in a state Can by their crimes prognosticate, And
in their consciences feel pain Some days before a shower of rain. He,
therefore, wisely cast about All ways he could to ensure his throat.”

In Dryden’s great portrait, on the contrary, violent passion, implacable
revenge, boldness amounting to temerity, are the most striking features.
Achitophel is one of the “great wits to madness near allied.” And
again--

“A daring pilot in extremity, Pleased with the danger when the waves
went high, He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit, Would steer too
near the sands to boast his wit.”

[It has never, we believe, been remarked, that two of the most striking
lines in the description of Achitophel are borrowed from a most obscure
quarter. In Knolles’s History of the Turks, printed more than sixty
years before the appearance of Absalom and Achitophel, are the following
verses, under a portrait of the Sultan Mustapha the First:

               “Greatnesse on goodnesse loves to slide, not stand,

               And leaves for Fortune’s ice Vertue’s firme land.”

Dryden’s words are

               “But wild Ambition loves to slide, not stand,

               And Fortune’s ice prefers to Virtue’s land.”

The circumstance is the more remarkable, because Dryden has really no
couplet which would seem to a good critic more intensely Drydenian, both
in thought and expression, than this, of which the whole thought, and
almost the whole expression, are stolen.

As we are on this subject, we cannot refrain from observing that Mr.
Courtenay has done Dryden injustice by inadvertently attributing to him
some feeble lines which are in Tate’s part of Absalom and Achitophel.]

The dates of the two poems will, we think, explain this discrepancy.
The third part of Hudibras appeared in 1678, when the character of
Shaftesbury had as yet but imperfectly developed itself. He had,
indeed, been a traitor to every party in the State; but his treasons had
hitherto prospered. Whether it were accident or sagacity, he had timed
his desertions in such a manner that fortune seemed to go to and fro
with him from side to side. The extent of his perfidy was known; but it
was not till the Popish Plot furnished him with a machinery which seemed
sufficiently powerful for all his purposes, that the audacity of his
spirit, and the fierceness of his malevolent passions, became fully
manifest. His subsequent conduct showed undoubtedly great ability, but
not ability of the sort for which he had formerly been so eminent. He
was now headstrong, sanguine, full of impetuous confidence in his own
wisdom and his own good luck. He, whose fame as a political tactician
had hitherto rested chiefly on his skilful retreats, now set himself
to break down all the bridges behind him. His plans were castles in the
air: his talk was rhodomontade. He took no thought for the morrow: he
treated the Court as if the King were already a prisoner in his hands:
he built on the favour of the multitude, as if that favour were not
proverbially inconstant. The signs of the coming reaction were discerned
by men of far less sagacity than his, and scared from his side men more
consistent than he had ever pretended to be. But on him they were
lost. The counsel of Achitophel, that counsel which was as if a man had
inquired of the oracle of God, was turned into foolishness. He who
had become a by-word, for the certainty with which he foresaw and the
suppleness with which he evaded danger, now, when beset on every side
with snares and death, seemed to be smitten with a blindness as strange
as his former clear-sightedness, and, turning neither to the right nor
to the left, strode straight on with desperate hardihood to his doom.
Therefore, after having early acquired and long preserved the reputation
of infallible wisdom and invariable success, he lived to see a mighty
ruin wrought by his own ungovernable passions, to see the great party
which he had led vanquished, and scattered, and trampled down, to see
all his own devilish enginery of lying witnesses, partial sheriffs,
packed juries, unjust judges, bloodthirsty mobs, ready to be employed
against himself and his most devoted followers, to fly from that proud
city whose favour had almost raised him to be Mayor of the Palace,
to hide himself in squalid retreats, to cover his grey head with
ignominious disguises; and he died in hopeless exile, sheltered by the
generosity of a State which he had cruelly injured and insulted, from
the vengeance of a master whose favour he had purchased by one series of
crimes, and forfeited by another.

Halifax had, in common with Shaftesbury, and with almost all the
politicians of that age, a very loose morality where the public was
concerned; but in Halifax the prevailing infection was modified by
a very peculiar constitution both of heart and head, by a temper
singularly free from gall, and by a refining and sceptical
understanding. He changed his course as often as Shaftesbury; but he did
not change it to the same extent, or in the same direction. Shaftesbury
was the very reverse of a trimmer. His disposition led him generally to
do his utmost to exalt the side which was up, and to depress the side
which was down. His transitions were from extreme to extreme. While he
stayed with a party he went all lengths for it: when he quitted it
he went all lengths against it. Halifax was emphatically a trimmer; a
trimmer both by intellect and by constitution. The name was fixed on him
by his contemporaries; and he was so far from being ashamed of it that
he assumed it as a badge of honour. He passed from faction to faction.
But instead of adopting and inflaming the passions of those whom he
joined, he tried to diffuse among them something of the spirit of
those whom he had just left. While he acted with the Opposition he was
suspected of being a spy of the Court; and when he had joined the Court
all the Tories were dismayed by his Republican doctrines.

He wanted neither arguments nor eloquence to exhibit what was commonly
regarded as his wavering policy in the fairest light. He trimmed,
he said, as the temperate zone trims between intolerable heat and
intolerable cold, as a good government trims between despotism and
anarchy, as a pure church trims between the errors of the Papist and
those of the Anabaptist. Nor was this defence by any means without
weight; for though there is abundant proof that his integrity was not of
strength to withstand the temptations by which his cupidity and vanity
were sometimes assailed, yet his dislike of extremes, and a forgiving
and compassionate temper which seems to have been natural to him,
preserved him from all participation in the worst crimes of his time. If
both parties accused him of deserting them, both were compelled to admit
that they had great obligations to his humanity, and that, though an
uncertain friend, he was a placable enemy. He voted in favour of Lord
Stafford, the victim of the Whigs; he did his utmost to save Lord
Russell, the victim of the Tories; and, on the whole, we are inclined to
think that his public life, though far indeed from faultless, has as
few great stains as that of any politician who took an active part in
affairs during the troubled and disastrous period of ten years which
elapsed between the fall of Lord Danby and the Revolution.

His mind was much less turned to particular observations, and much more
to general speculations, than that of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury knew the
King, the Council, the Parliament, the City, better than Halifax; but
Halifax would have written a far better treatise on political science
than Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury shone more in consultation, and Halifax in
controversy: Shaftesbury was more fertile in expedients, and Halifax in
arguments. Nothing that remains from the pen of Shaftesbury will bear a
comparison with the political tracts of Halifax. Indeed, very little
of the prose of that age is so well worth reading as the Character of a
Trimmer and the Anatomy of an Equivalent. What particularly strikes
us in those works is the writer’s passion for generalisation. He was
treating of the most exciting subjects in the most agitated times he was
himself placed in the very thick of the civil conflict; yet there is no
acrimony, nothing inflammatory, nothing personal. He preserves an air of
cold superiority, a certain philosophical serenity, which is perfectly
marvellous. He treats every question as an abstract question, begins
with the widest propositions, argues those propositions on general
grounds, and often, when he has brought out his theorem, leaves the
reader to make the application, without adding an allusion to particular
men, or to passing events. This speculative turn of mind rendered him a
bad adviser in cases which required celerity. He brought forward,
with wonderful readiness and copiousness, arguments, replies to those
arguments, rejoinders to those replies, general maxims of policy, and
analogous cases from history. But Shaftesbury was the man for a prompt
decision. Of the parliamentary eloquence of these celebrated rivals,
we can judge only by report; and, so judging, we should be inclined
to think that, though Shaftesbury was a distinguished speaker, the
superiority belonged to Halifax. Indeed the readiness of Halifax in
debate, the extent of his knowledge, the ingenuity of his reasoning, the
liveliness of his expression, and the silver clearness and sweetness
of his voice, seems to have made the strongest impression on his
contemporaries. By Dryden he is described as

                   “of piercing wit and pregnant thought,
               Endued by nature and by learning taught
               To move assemblies.”

His oratory is utterly and irretrievably lost to us, like that of
Somers, of Bolingbroke, of Charles Townshend, of many others who were
accustomed to rise amid the breathless expectation of senates, and to
sit down amidst reiterated bursts of applause. But old men who lived to
admire the eloquence of Pulteney in its meridian, and that of Pitt in
its splendid dawn, still murmured that they had heard nothing like
the great speeches of Lord Halifax on the Exclusion Bill. The power of
Shaftesbury over large masses was unrivalled. Halifax was disqualified
by his whole character, moral and intellectual, for the part of a
demagogue. It was in small circles, and, above all, in the House of
Lords, that his ascendency was felt.

Shaftesbury seems to have troubled himself very little about theories
of government. Halifax was, in speculation, a strong republican, and did
not conceal it. He often made hereditary monarchy and aristocracy the
subjects of his keen pleasantry, while he was fighting the battles of
the Court, and obtaining for himself step after step in the peerage. In
this way, he tried to gratify at once his intellectual vanity and his
more vulgar ambition. He shaped his life according to the opinion of the
multitude, and indemnified himself by talking according to his own.
His colloquial powers were great; his perception of the ridiculous
exquisitely fine; and he seems to have had the rare art of preserving
the reputation of good breeding and good nature, while habitually
indulging a strong propensity to mockery.

Temple wished to put Halifax into the new Council, and leave out
Shaftesbury. The King objected strongly to Halifax, to whom he had taken
a great dislike, which is not accounted for, and which did not last
long. Temple replied that Halifax was a man eminent both by his station
and by his abilities, and would, if excluded, do everything against the
new arrangement that could be done by eloquence, sarcasm, and intrigue.
All who were consulted were of the same mind; and the King yielded, but
not till Temple had almost gone on his knees. This point was no sooner
settled than his Majesty declared that he would have Shaftesbury too.
Temple again had recourse to entreaties and expostulations. Charles told
him that the enmity of Shaftesbury would be at least as formidable as
that of Halifax, and this was true; but Temple might have replied that
by giving power to Halifax they gained a friend, and that by giving
power to Shaftesbury they only strengthened an enemy. It was vain to
argue and protest. The King only laughed and jested at Temple’s anger;
and Shaftesbury was not only sworn of the Council, but appointed Lord
President.

Temple was so bitterly mortified by this step that he had at one
time resolved to have nothing to do with the new Administration, and
seriously thought of disqualifying himself from sitting in council by
omitting to take the Sacrament. But the urgency of Lady Temple and Lady
Giffard induced him to abandon that intention.

The Council was organised on the twenty-first of April, 1679; and,
within a few hours, one of the fundamental principles on which it had
been constructed was violated. A secret committee, or, in the modern
phrase, a cabinet of nine members, was formed. But as this committee
included Shaftesbury and Monmouth, it contained within itself the
elements of as much faction as would have sufficed to impede all
business. Accordingly there soon arose a small interior cabinet,
consisting of Essex, Sunderland, Halifax, and Temple. For a time perfect
harmony and confidence subsisted between the four. But the meetings of
the thirty were stormy. Sharp retorts passed between Shaftesbury and
Halifax, who led the opposite parties, In the Council, Halifax generally
had the advantage. But it soon became apparent that Shaftesbury still
had at his back the majority of the House of Commons. The discontents
which the change of Ministry had for a moment quieted broke forth again
with redoubled violence; and the only effect which the late measures
appeared to have produced was that the Lord President, with all the
dignity and authority belonging to his high place, stood at the head of
the Opposition. The impeachment of Lord Danby was eagerly prosecuted.
The Commons were determined to exclude the Duke of York from the throne.
All offers of compromise were rejected. It must not be forgotten,
however, that, in the midst of the confusion, one inestimable law, the
only benefit which England has derived from the troubles of that period,
but a benefit which may well be set off against a great mass of evil,
the Habeas Corpus Act, was pushed through the Houses and received the
royal assent.

The King, finding the Parliament as troublesome as ever, determined to
prorogue it; and he did so, without even mentioning his intention to the
Council by whose advice he had pledged himself, only a month before, to
conduct the Government. The counsellors were generally dissatisfied; and
Shaftesbury swore, with great vehemence, that if he could find out who
the secret advisers were, he would have their heads.

The Parliament rose; London was deserted; and Temple retired to his
villa, whence, on council days, he went to Hampton Court. The post of
Secretary was again and again pressed on him by his master and by
his three colleagues of the inner Cabinet. Halifax, in particular,
threatened laughingly to burn down the house at Sheen. But Temple was
immovable. His short experience of English politics had disgusted him;
and he felt himself so much oppressed by the responsibility under which
he at present lay that he had no inclination to add to the load.

When the term fixed for the prorogation had nearly expired, it became
necessary to consider what course should be taken. The King and his four
confidential advisers thought that a new Parliament might possibly be
more manageable, and could not possibly be more refractory, than that
which they now had, and they therefore determined on a dissolution. But
when the question was proposed at council, the majority, jealous, it
should seem, of the small directing knot, and unwilling to bear the
unpopularity of the measures of Government, while excluded from all
power, joined Shaftesbury, and the members of the Cabinet were left
alone in the minority. The King, however, had made up his mind, and
ordered the Parliament to be instantly dissolved. Temple’s Council was
now nothing more than an ordinary Privy Council, if indeed it were not
something less; and, though Temple threw the blame of this on the King,
on Lord Shaftesbury, on everybody but himself, it is evident that
the failure of his plan is to be chiefly ascribed to its own inherent
defects. His Council was too large to transact business which required
expedition, secrecy, and cordial cooperation. A Cabinet was therefore
formed within the Council. The Cabinet and the majority of the Council
differed; and, as was to be expected, the Cabinet carried their point.
Four votes outweighed six-and-twenty. This being the case, the meetings
of the thirty were not only useless, but positively noxious.

At the ensuing election, Temple was chosen for the University of
Cambridge. The only objection that was made to him by the members
of that learned body was that, in his little work on Holland, he had
expressed great approbation of the tolerant policy of the States; and
this blemish, however serious, was overlooked, in consideration of his
high reputation, and of the strong recommendations with which he was
furnished by the Court.

During the summer he remained at Sheen, and amused himself with rearing
melons, leaving to the three other members of the inner Cabinet the
whole direction of public affairs. Some unexplained cause began about
this time, to alienate them from him. They do not appear to have
been made angry by any part of his conduct, or to have disliked him
personally. But they had, we suspect, taken the measure of his mind, and
satisfied themselves that he was not a man for that troubled time,
and that he would be a mere incumbrance to them. Living themselves for
ambition, they despised his love of ease. Accustomed to deep stakes
in the game of political hazard, they despised his piddling play. They
looked on his cautious measures with the sort of scorn with which the
gamblers at the ordinary, in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, regarded Nigel’s
practice of never touching a card but when he was certain to win. He
soon found that he was left out of their secrets. The King had, about
this time, a dangerous attack of illness. The Duke of York, on receiving
the news, returned from Holland. The sudden appearance of the detested
Popish successor excited anxiety throughout the country. Temple was
greatly amazed and disturbed. He hastened up to London and visited
Essex, who professed to be astonished and mortified, but could not
disguise a sneering smile. Temple then saw Halifax, who talked to him
much about the pleasures of the country, the anxieties of office, and
the vanity of all human things, but carefully avoided politics and when
the Duke’s return was mentioned, only sighed, shook his head, shrugged
his shoulders, and lifted up his eyes and hands. In a short time Temple
found that his two friends had been laughing at him, and that they had
themselves sent for the Duke, in order that his Royal Highness might,
if the King should die, be on the spot to frustrate the designs of
Monmouth.

He was soon convinced, by a still stronger proof, that, though he had
not exactly offended his master or his colleagues in the Cabinet, he had
ceased to enjoy their confidence. The result of the general election
had been decidedly unfavourable to the Government; and Shaftesbury
impatiently expected the day when the Houses were to meet. The King,
guided by the advice of the inner Cabinet, determined on a step of the
highest importance. He told the Council that he had resolved to prorogue
the new Parliament for a year, and requested them not to object; for he
had, he said, considered the subject fully, and had made up his mind.
All who were not in the secret were thunderstruck, Temple as much
as any. Several members rose, and entreated to be heard against
the prorogation. But the King silenced them, and declared that his
resolution was unalterable. Temple, much hurt at the manner in which
both himself and the Council had been treated, spoke with great spirit.
He would not, he said, disobey the King by objecting to a measure an
which his Majesty was determined to hear no argument; but he would most
earnestly entreat his Majesty, if the present Council was incompetent
to give advice, to dissolve it and select another; for it was absurd to
have counsellors who did not counsel, and who were summoned only to be
silent witnesses of the acts of others. The King listened courteously.
But the members of the Cabinet resented this reproof highly; and
from that day Temple was almost as much estranged from them as from
Shaftesbury.

He wished to retire altogether from business. But just at this time
Lord Russell, Lord Cavendish, and some other counsellors of the
popular party, waited on the King in a body, declared their strong
disapprobation of his measures, and requested to be excused from
attending any more at council. Temple feared that if, at this moment, he
also were to withdraw, he might be supposed to act in concert with
those decided opponents of the Court, and to have determined on taking
a course hostile to the Government. He, therefore, continued to go
occasionally to the board; but he had no longer any real share in the
direction of public affairs.

At length the long term of the prorogation expired. In October 1680,
the Houses met; and the great question of the Exclusion was revived.
Few parliamentary contests in our history appear to have called forth a
greater display of talent; none certainly ever called forth more violent
passions. The whole nation was convulsed by party spirit. The gentlemen
of every county, the traders of every town, the boys of every public
school, were divided into exclusionists and abhorrers. The book-stalls
were covered with tracts on the sacredness of hereditary right, on the
omnipotence of Parliament, on the dangers of a disputed succession, on
the dangers of a Popish reign. It was in the midst of this ferment that
Temple took his seat, for the first time, in the House of Commons.

The occasion was a very great one. His talents, his long experience of
affairs, his unspotted public character, the high posts which he had
filled, seemed to mark him out as a man on whom much would depend. He
acted like himself, He saw that, if he supported the Exclusion, he made
the King and the heir presumptive his enemies, and that, if he opposed
it, he made himself an object of hatred to the unscrupulous and
turbulent Shaftesbury. He neither supported nor opposed it. He quietly
absented himself from the House. Nay, he took care, he tells us,
never to discuss the question in any society whatever. Lawrence Hyde,
afterwards Earl of Rochester, asked him why he did not attend in his
place. Temple replied that he acted according to Solomon’s advice,
neither to oppose the mighty, nor to go about to stop the current of a
river. Hyde answered, “You are a wise and a quiet man.” And this might
be true. But surely such wise and quiet men have no call to be members
of Parliament in critical times.

A single session was quite enough for Temple. When the Parliament was
dissolved, and another summoned at Oxford, he obtained an audience of
the King, and begged to know whether his Majesty wished him to
continue in Parliament. Charles, who had a singularly quick eye for the
weaknesses of all who came near him, had no doubt seen through Temple,
and rated the parliamentary support of so cool and guarded a friend at
its proper value. He answered good-naturedly, but we suspect a little
contemptuously, “I doubt, as things stand, your coming into the House
will not do much good. I think you may as well let it alone.” Sir
William accordingly informed his constituents that he should not again
apply for their suffrages, and set off for Sheen, resolving never
again to meddle with public affairs. He soon found that the King was
displeased with him. Charles, indeed, in his usual easy way, protested
that he was not angry, not at all. But in a few days he struck Temple’s
name out of the list of Privy Councillors.

Why this was done Temple declares himself unable to comprehend. But
surely it hardly required his long and extensive converse with the world
to teach him that there are conjunctures when men think that all who
are not with them are against them, that there are conjunctures when a
lukewarm friend, who will not put himself the least out of his way, who
will make no exertion, who will run no risk, is more distasteful than
an enemy. Charles had hoped that the fair character of Temple would add
credit to an unpopular and suspected Government. But his Majesty soon
found that this fair character resembled pieces of furniture which we
have seen in the drawing-rooms of very precise old ladies, and which
are a great deal too white to be used. This exceeding niceness was
altogether out of season. Neither party wanted a man who was afraid
of taking a part, of incurring abuse, of making enemies. There were
probably many good and moderate men who would have hailed the appearance
of a respectable mediator. But Temple was not a mediator. He was merely
a neutral.

At last, however, he had escaped from public life, and found himself at
liberty to follow his favourite pursuits. His fortune was easy. He had
about fifteen hundred a year, besides the Mastership of the Rolls in
Ireland, an office in which he had succeeded his father, and which was
then a mere sinecure for life, requiring no residence. His reputation
both as a negotiator and a writer stood high. He resolved to be safe,
to enjoy himself, and to let the world take its course; and he kept his
resolution.

Darker times followed. The Oxford Parliament was dissolved. The Tories
were triumphant. A terrible vengeance was inflicted on the chiefs of the
Opposition. Temple learned in his retreat the disastrous fate of several
of his old colleagues in council. Shaftesbury fled to Holland. Russell
died on the scaffold. Essex added a yet sadder and more fearful story
to the bloody chronicles of the Tower. Monmouth clung in agonies of
supplication round the knees of the stern uncle whom he had wronged, and
tasted a bitterness worse than that of death, the bitterness of knowing
that he had humbled himself in vain. A tyrant trampled on the liberties
and religion of the realm. The national spirit swelled high under the
oppression. Disaffection spread even to the strongholds of loyalty,
to the Cloisters of Westminster, to the schools of Oxford, to the
guard-room of the household troops, to the very hearth and bed-chamber
of the Sovereign. But the troubles which agitated the whole country did
not reach the quiet orangery in which Temple loitered away several years
without once seeing the smoke of London. He now and then appeared in
the circle at Richmond or Windsor. But the only expressions which he is
recorded to have used during these perilous times were, that he would be
a good subject, but that he had done with politics.

The Revolution came: he remained strictly neutral during the short
struggle; and he then transferred to the new settlement the same languid
sort of loyalty which he had felt for his former masters. He paid court
to William at Windsor, and William dined with him at Sheen. But, in
spite of the most pressing solicitations, Temple refused to become
Secretary of State. The refusal evidently proceeded only from his
dislike of trouble and danger; and not, as some of his admirers would
have us believe, from any scruple of conscience or honour. For he
consented that his son should take the office of Secretary at War under
the new Sovereign. This unfortunate young man destroyed himself within a
week after his appointment from vexation at finding that his advice had
led the King into some improper steps with regard to Ireland. He seems
to have inherited his father’s extreme sensibility to failure, without
that singular prudence which kept his father out of all situations in
which any serious failure was to be apprehended. The blow fell heavily
on the family. They retired in deep dejection to Moor Park, [Mr.
Courtenay (vol. ii. p. 160) confounds Moor Park in Surrey, where Temple
resided, with the Moor Park in Hertfordshire, which is praised in the
Essay on Gardening.] which they now preferred to Sheen, on account of
the greater distance from London. In that spot, then very secluded,
Temple passed the remainder of his life. The air agreed with him.
The soil was fruitful, and well suited to an experimental farmer and
gardener. The grounds were laid out with the angular regularity which
Sir William had admired in the flower-beds of Haarlem and the Hague. A
beautiful rivulet, flowing from the hills of Surrey, bounded the domain.
But a straight canal which, bordered by a terrace, intersected the
garden, was probably more admired by the lovers of the picturesque
in that age. The house was small but neat, and well-furnished; the
neighbourhood very thinly peopled. Temple had no visitors, except a few
friends who were willing to travel twenty or thirty miles in order to
see him, and now and then a foreigner whom curiosity brought to have a
look at the author of the Triple Alliance.

Here, in May 1694, died Lady Temple. From the time of her marriage we
know little of her, except that her letters were always greatly admired,
and that she had the honour to correspond constantly with Queen Mary.
Lady Giffard, who, as far as appears, had always been on the best terms
with her sister-in-law, still continued to live with Sir William.

But there were other inmates of Moor Park to whom a far higher interest
belongs. An eccentric, uncouth, disagreeable young Irishman, who
had narrowly escaped plucking at Dublin, attended Sir William as an
amanuensis, for board and twenty pounds a year, dined at the second
table, wrote bad verses in praise of his employer, and made love to a
very pretty, dark-eyed young girl, who waited on Lady Giffard. Little
did Temple imagine that the coarse exterior of his dependant concealed
a genius equally suited to politics and to letters, a genius destined to
shake great kingdoms, to stir the laughter and the rage of millions, and
to leave to posterity memorials which can perish only with the English
language. Little did he think that the flirtation in his servants’ hall,
which he perhaps scarcely deigned to make the subject of a jest, was the
beginning of a long unprosperous love, which was to be as widely famed
as the passion of Petrarch or of Abelard. Sir William’s secretary was
Jonathan Swift. Lady Giffard’s waiting-maid was poor Stella.

Swift retained no pleasing recollection of Moor Park. And we may easily
suppose a situation like his to have been intolerably painful to a mind
haughty, irascible, and conscious of pre-eminent ability. Long after,
when he stood in the Court of Requests with a circle of gartered peers
round him, or punned and rhymed with Cabinet Ministers over Secretary
St. John’s Monte-Pulciano, he remembered, with deep and sore feeling,
how miserable he used to be for days together when he suspected that Sir
William had taken something ill. He could hardly believe that he, the
Swift who chid the Lord Treasurer, rallied the Captain General, and
confronted the pride of the Duke of Buckinghamshire with pride still
more inflexible, could be the same being who had passed nights of
sleepless anxiety, in musing over a cross look or a testy word of a
patron. “Faith,” he wrote to Stella, with bitter levity, “Sir William
spoiled a fine gentleman.” Yet, in justice to Temple, we must say that
there is no reason to think that Swift was more unhappy at Moor Park
than he would have been in a similar situation under any roof in
England. We think also that the obligations which the mind of Swift owed
to that of Temple were not inconsiderable. Every judicious reader must
be struck by the peculiarities which distinguish Swift’s political
tracts from all similar works produced by mere men of letters. Let any
person compare, for example, the Conduct of the Allies, or the Letter
to the October Club, with Johnson’s False Alarm, or Taxation no Tyranny,
and he will be at once struck by the difference of which we speak. He
may possibly think Johnson a greater man than Swift. He may possibly
prefer Johnson’s style to Swift’s. But he will at once acknowledge that
Johnson writes like a man who has never been out of his study. Swift
writes like a man who has passed his whole life in the midst of public
business, and to whom the most important affairs of state are as
familiar as his weekly bills.

“Turn him to any cause of policy, The Gordian knot of it he will
unloose, Familiar as his garter.”

The difference, in short, between a political pamphlet by Johnson and
a political pamphlet by Swift, is as great as the difference between an
account of a battle by Mr. Southey, and the account of the same battle
by Colonel Napier. It is impossible to doubt that the superiority of
Swift is to be, in a great measure, attributed to his long and close
connection with Temple.

Indeed, remote as were the alleys and flower-pots of Moor Park from the
haunts of the busy and the ambitious, Swift had ample opportunities of
becoming acquainted with the hidden causes of many great events. William
was in the habit of consulting Temple, and occasionally visited him. Of
what passed between them very little is known. It is certain, however,
that when the Triennial Bill had been carried through the two Houses,
his Majesty, who was exceedingly unwilling to pass it, sent the Earl of
Portland to learn Temple’s opinion. Whether Temple thought the bill in
itself a good one does not appear; but he clearly saw how imprudent
it must be in a prince, situated as William was, to engage in an
altercation with his Parliament, and directed Swift to draw up a paper
on the subject, which, however, did not convince the King.

The chief amusement of Temple’s declining years was literature. After
his final retreat from business, he wrote his very agreeable Memoirs,
corrected and transcribed many of his letters, and published several
miscellaneous treatises, the best of which, we think, is that on
Gardening. The style of his essays is, on the whole, excellent, almost
always pleasing, and now and then stately and splendid. The matter is
generally of much less value; as our readers will readily believe when
we inform them that Mr. Courtenay, a biographer, that is to say, a
literary vassal, bound by the immemorial law of his tenure to render
homage, aids, reliefs, and all other customary services to his lord,
avows that he cannot give an opinion about the essay on Heroic Virtue,
because he cannot read it without skipping; a circumstance which strikes
us as peculiarly strange, when we consider how long Mr. Courtenay was
at the India Board, and how many thousand paragraphs of the copious
official eloquence of the East he must have perused.

One of Sir William’s pieces, however, deserves notice, not, indeed, on
account of its intrinsic merit, but on account of the light which it
throws on some curious weaknesses of his character, and on account of
the extraordinary effects which it produced in the republic of letters.
A most idle and contemptible controversy had arisen in France touching
the comparative merit of the ancient and modern writers. It was
certainly not to be expected that, in that age, the question would be
tried according to those large and philosophical principles of criticism
which guided the judgments of Lessing and of Herder. But it might have
been expected that those who undertook to decide the point would at
least take the trouble to read and understand the authors on whose
merits they were to pronounce. Now, it is no exaggeration to say that,
among the disputants who clamoured, some for the ancients and some for
the moderns, very few were decently acquainted with either ancient or
modern literature, and hardly one was well acquainted with both. In
Racine’s amusing preface to the Iphigenie the reader may have noticed a
most ridiculous mistake into which one of the champions of the moderns
fell about a passage in the Alcestis of Euripides. Another writer is
so inconceivably ignorant as to blame Homer for mixing the four Greek
dialects, Doric, Ionic, Aeolic, and Attic, just, says he, as if a French
poet were to put Gascon phrases and Picard phrases into the midst of his
pure Parisian writing. On the other hand, it is no exaggeration to say
that the defenders of the ancients were entirely unacquainted with the
greatest productions of later times; nor, indeed, were the defenders of
the moderns better informed. The parallels which were instituted in the
course of this dispute are inexpressibly ridiculous. Balzac was selected
as the rival of Cicero. Corneille was said to unite the merits of
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. We should like to see a Prometheus
after Corneille’s fashion. The Provincial Letters, masterpieces
undoubtedly of reasoning, wit, and eloquence, were pronounced to be
superior to all the writings of Plato, Cicero, and Lucian together,
particularly in the art of dialogue, an art in which, as it happens,
Plato far excelled all men, and in which Pascal, great and admirable in
other respects, is notoriously very deficient.

This childish controversy spread to England; and some mischievous
daemon suggested to Temple the thought of undertaking the defence of the
ancients. As to his qualifications for the task, it is sufficient to
say that he knew not a word of Greek. But his vanity, which, when he was
engaged in the conflicts of active life and surrounded by rivals, had
been kept in tolerable order by his discretion, now, when he had long
lived in seclusion, and had become accustomed to regard himself as
by far the first man of his circle, rendered him blind to his own
deficiencies. In an evil hour he published an Essay on Ancient and
Modern Learning. The style of this treatise is very good, the matter
ludicrous and contemptible to the last degree. There we read how
Lycurgus travelled into India, and brought the Spartan laws from that
country; how Orpheus made voyages in search of knowledge, and attained
to a depth of learning which has made him renowned in all succeeding
ages; how Pythagoras passed twenty-two years in Egypt, and, after
graduating there, spent twelve years more at Babylon, where the Magi
admitted him ad eundem; how the ancient Brahmins lived two hundred
years; how the earliest Greek philosophers foretold earthquakes and
plagues, and put down riots by magic; and how much Ninus surpassed in
abilities any of his successors on the throne of Assyria. The moderns,
Sir William owns, have found out the circulation of blood; but, on
the other hand, they have quite lost the art of conjuring; nor can any
modern fiddler enchant fishes, fowls, and serpents by his performance.
He tells us that “Thales, Pythagoras, Democritus, Hippocrates, Plato,
Aristotle, and Epicurus made greater progresses in the several empires
of science than any of their successors have since been able to reach”;
which is just as absurd as if he had said that the greatest names in
British science are Merlin, Michael Scott, Dr. Sydenham, and Lord Bacon.
Indeed, the manner in which Temple mixes the historical and the fabulous
reminds us of those classical dictionaries, intended for the use of
schools, in which Narcissus the lover of himself and Narcissus the
freedman of Claudius, Pollux the son of Jupiter and Leda and Pollux
the author of the Onomasticon, are ranged under the same headings, and
treated as personages equally real.

The effect of this arrangement resembles that which would be produced
by a dictionary of modern names, consisting of such articles as the
following:-“Jones, William, an eminent Orientalist, and one of the
judges of the Supreme Court of judicature in Bengal--Davy, a fiend, who
destroys ships--Thomas, a foundling, brought up by Mr. Allworthy.” It is
from such sources as these that Temple seems to have learned all that
he knew about the ancients. He puts the story of Orpheus between the
Olympic games and the battle of Arbela; as if we had exactly the same
reasons for believing that Orpheus led beasts with his lyre, which we
have for believing that there were races at Pisa, or that Alexander
conquered Darius.

He manages little better when he comes to the moderns. He gives us a
catalogue of those whom he regards as the greatest writers of later
times. It is sufficient to say that, in his list of Italians, he has
omitted Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso; in his list of Spaniards,
Lope and Calderon; in his list of French, Pascal, Bossuet, Moliere,
Corneille, Racine, and Boileau; and in his list of English, Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.

In the midst of all this vast mass of absurdity one paragraph stands out
pre-eminent. The doctrine of Temple, not a very comfortable doctrine,
is that the human race is constantly degenerating, and that the oldest
books in every kind are the best in confirmation of this notion, he
remarks that the Fables of Aesop are the best Fables, and the Letters of
Phalaris the best Letters in the world. On the merit of the Letters of
Phalaris he dwells with great warmth and with extraordinary felicity of
language. Indeed we could hardly select a more favourable specimen of
the graceful and easy majesty to which his style sometimes rises than
this unlucky passage. He knows, he says, that some learned men, or men
who pass for learned, such as Politian, have doubted the genuineness of
these letters; but of such doubts he speaks with the greatest contempt.
Now it is perfectly certain, first, that the letters are very bad;
secondly, that they are spurious; and thirdly, that, whether they be bad
or good, spurious or genuine, Temple could know nothing of the matter;
inasmuch as he was no more able to construe a line of them than to
decipher an Egyptian obelisk.

This Essay, silly as it is, was exceedingly well received, both in
England and on the Continent. And the reason is evident. The classical
scholars who saw its absurdity were generally on the side of the
ancients, and were inclined rather to veil than to expose the blunders
of an ally; the champions of the moderns were generally as ignorant
as Temple himself; and the multitude was charmed by his flowing
and melodious diction. He was doomed, however, to smart, as he well
deserved, for his vanity and folly.

Christchurch at Oxford was then widely and justly celebrated as a place
where the lighter parts of classical learning were cultivated with
success. With the deeper mysteries of philology neither the instructors
nor the pupils had the smallest acquaintance. They fancied themselves
Scaligers, as Bentley scornfully said, if they could write a copy of
Latin verses with only two or three small faults. From this College
proceeded a new edition of the Letters of Phalaris, which were rare, and
had been in request since the appearance of Temple’s Essay. The nominal
editor was Charles Boyle, a young man of noble family and promising
parts; but some older members of the society lent their assistance.
While this work was in preparation, an idle quarrel, occasioned, it
should seem, by the negligence and misrepresentations of a bookseller,
arose between Boyle and the King’s Librarian, Richard Bentley. Boyle
in the preface to his edition, inserted a bitter reflection on Bentley.
Bentley revenged himself by proving that the Epistles of Phalaris
were forgeries, and in his remarks on this subject treated Temple, not
indecently, but with no great reverence.

Temple, who was quite unaccustomed to any but the most respectful usage,
who, even while engaged in politics, had always shrunk from all rude
collision, and had generally succeeded in avoiding it, and whose
sensitiveness had been increased by many years of seclusion and
flattery, was moved to most violent resentment, complained, very
unjustly, of Bentley’s foul-mouthed raillery, and declared that he had
commenced an answer, but had laid it aside, “having no mind to enter the
lists with such a mean, dull, unmannerly pedant” Whatever may be thought
of the temper which Sir William showed on this occasion, we cannot
too highly applaud his discretion in not finishing and publishing
his answer, which would certainly have been a most extraordinary
performance.

He was not, however, without defenders. Like Hector, when struck down
prostrate by Ajax, he was in an instant covered by a thick crowd of
shields.

Outis edunesato poimena laou Outasai oudi balein prin gar peribesan
aristoi Polubmas te, kai Aineias, kai dios Agenor, Sarpedon t’archos
Lukion, kai Glaukos amumon.

Christchurch was up in arms; and though that College seems then to have
been almost destitute of severe and accurate learning, no academical
society could show a greater array of orators, wits, politicians,
bustling adventurers who united the superficial accomplishments of the
scholar with the manners and arts of the man of the world; and this
formidable body resolved to try how far smart repartees, well-turned
sentences, confidence, puffing, and intrigue could, on the question
whether a Greek book were or were not genuine, supply the place of a
little knowledge of Greek.

Out came the Reply to Bentley, bearing the name of Boyle, but in truth
written by Atterbury with the assistance of Smalridge and others. A most
remarkable book it is, and often reminds us of Goldsmith’s observation,
that the French would be the best cooks in the world if they had any
butcher’s meat, for that they can make ten dishes out of a nettle-top.
It really deserves the praise, whatever that praise may be worth, of
being the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a
question of which he was profoundly ignorant. The learning of the
confederacy is that of a schoolboy, and not of an extraordinary
schoolboy; but it is used with the skill and address of most able,
artful, and experienced men; it is beaten out to the very thinnest leaf,
and is disposed in such a way as to seem ten times larger than it is.
The dexterity with which the confederates avoid grappling with those
parts of the subject with which they know themselves to be incompetent
to deal is quite wonderful. Now and then, indeed, they commit
disgraceful blunders, for which old Busby, under whom they had studied,
would have whipped them all round. But this circumstance only raises our
opinion of the talents which made such a fight with such scanty means.
Let readers who are not acquainted with the controversy imagine a
Frenchman, who has acquired just English enough to read the Spectator
with a dictionary, coming forward to defend the genuineness of Ireland’s
Vortigern against Malone; and they will have some notion of the feat
which Atterbury had the audacity to undertake, and which, for a time, it
was really thought that he had performed.

The illusion was soon dispelled. Bentley’s answer for ever settled the
question, and established his claim to the first place amongst classical
scholars. Nor do those do him justice who represent the controversy as
a battle between wit and learning. For though there is a lamentable
deficiency of learning on the side of Boyle, there is no want of wit on
the side of Bentley. Other qualities, too, as valuable as either wit or
learning, appear conspicuously in Bentley’s book, a rare sagacity, an
unrivalled power of combination, a perfect mastery of all the weapons
of logic. He was greatly indebted to the furious outcry which the
misrepresentations, sarcasms, and intrigues of his opponents had raised
against him, an outcry in which fashionable and political circles
joined, and which was echoed by thousands who did not know whether
Phalaris ruled in Sicily or in Siam. His spirit, daring even to
rashness, self-confident even to negligence, and proud even to insolent
ferocity, was awed for the first and for the last time, awed, not into
meanness or cowardice, but into wariness and sobriety. For once he ran
no risks; he left no crevice unguarded; he wantoned in no paradoxes;
above all, he returned no railing for the railing of his enemies. In
almost everything that he has written we can discover proofs of genius
and learning. But it is only here that his genius and learning appear to
have been constantly under the guidance of good sense and good temper.
Here, we find none of that besotted reliance on his own powers and on
his own luck, which he showed when he undertook to edit Milton; none of
that perverted ingenuity which deforms so many of his notes on Horace;
none of that disdainful carelessness by which he laid himself open to
the keen and dexterous thrust of Middleton; none of that extravagant
vaunting and savage scurrility by which he afterwards dishonoured his
studies and his profession, and degraded himself almost to the level of
De Pauw.

Temple did not live to witness the utter and irreparable defeat of
his champions. He died, indeed, at a fortunate moment, just after the
appearance of Boyle’s book, and while all England was laughing at the
way in which the Christchurch men had handled the pedant. In Boyle’s
book, Temple was praised in the highest terms, and compared to Memmius:
not a very happy comparison; for almost the only particular information
which we have about Memmius is that, in agitated times, he thought it
his duty to attend exclusively to politics, and that his friends could
not venture, except when the Republic was quiet and prosperous, to
intrude on him with their philosophical and poetical productions. It is
on this account that Lucretius puts up the exquisitely beautiful prayer
for peace with which his poem opens.

“Nam neque nos agere hoc patriai tempore iniquo Possumus aequo animo,
nec Memmi clara propago Talibus in rebus communi de esse saluti.”

This description is surely by no means applicable to a statesman who
had, through the whole course of his life, carefully avoided exposing
himself in seasons of trouble; who had repeatedly refused, in most
critical conjunctures, to be Secretary of State; and, who now, in the
midst of revolutions, plots, foreign and domestic wars, was quietly
writing nonsense about the visits of Lycurgus to the Brahmins and the
tunes which Arion played to the Dolphin.

We must not omit to mention that, while the controversy about Phalaris
was raging, Swift, in order to show his zeal and attachment, wrote the
Battle of the Books, the earliest piece in which his peculiar talents
are discernible. We may observe that the bitter dislike of Bentley,
bequeathed by Temple to Swift, seems to have been communicated by Swift
to Pope, to Arbuthnot, and to others, who continued to tease the great
critic long after he had shaken hands very cordially both with Boyle and
with Atterbury.

Sir William Temple died at Moor Park in January 1699. He appears to have
suffered no intellectual decay. His heart was buried under a sundial
which still stands in his favourite garden. His body was laid in
Westminster Abbey by the side of his wife; and a place hard by was set
apart for Lady Giffard, who long survived him. Swift was his literary
executor, superintended the publication of his Letters and Memoirs, and,
in the performance of this office, had some acrimonious contests with
the family.

Of Temple’s character little more remains to be said. Burnet accuses him
of holding irreligious opinions, and corrupting everybody who came near
him. But the vague assertion of so rash and partial a writer as Burnet,
about a man with whom, as far as we know, he never exchanged a word, is
of little weight. It is, indeed, by no means improbable that Temple may
have been a freethinker. The Osbornes thought him so when he was a very
young man. And it is certain that a large proportion of the gentlemen of
rank and fashion who made their entrance into society while the Puritan
party was at the height of power, and while the memory of the reign
of that party was still recent, conceived a strong disgust for all
religion. The imputation was common between Temple and all the most
distinguished courtiers of the age. Rochester, and Buckingham were open
scoffers, and Mulgrave very little better. Shaftesbury, though more
guarded, was supposed to agree with them in opinion. All the three
noblemen who were Temple’s colleagues during the short time of his
sitting in the Cabinet were of very indifferent repute as to orthodoxy.
Halifax, indeed, was generally considered as an atheist; but he solemnly
denied the charge; and, indeed, the truth seems to be that he was more
religiously disposed than most of the statesmen of that age, though two
impulses which were unusually strong in him, a passion for ludicrous
images, and a passion for subtle speculations, sometimes prompted him to
talk on serious subjects in a manner which gave grave and just offence.
It is not unlikely that Temple, who seldom went below the surface of
any question, may have been infected with the prevailing scepticism. All
that we can say on the subject is, that there is no trace of impiety in
his works, and that the case with which he carried his election for an
university, where the majority of the voters were clergymen, though
it proves nothing as to his opinions, must, we think, be considered as
proving that he was not, as Burnet seems to insinuate, in the habit of
talking atheism to all who came near him.

Temple, however, will scarcely carry with him any great accession of
authority to the side either of religion or of infidelity. He was
no profound thinker. He was merely a man of lively parts and quick
observation, a man of the world among men of letters, a man of letters
among men of the world. Mere scholars were dazzled by the Ambassador and
Cabinet counsellor; mere politicians by the Essayist and Historian. But
neither as a writer nor as a statesman can we allot to him any very high
place. As a man, he seems to us to have been excessively selfish, but
very sober, wary, and far-sighted in his selfishness; to have known
better than most people what he really wanted in life; and to have
pursued what he wanted with much more than ordinary steadiness and
sagacity, never suffering himself to be drawn aside either by bad or
by good feelings. It was his constitution to dread failure more than he
desired success, to prefer security, comfort, repose, leisure, to the
turmoil and anxiety which are inseparable from greatness; and this
natural languor of mind, when contrasted with the malignant energy of
the keen and restless spirits among whom his lot was cast, sometimes
appears to resemble the moderation of virtue. But we must own that he
seems to us to sink into littleness and meanness when we compare him,
we do not say with any high ideal standard of morality, but with many
of those frail men who, aiming at noble ends, but often drawn from
the right path by strong passions and strong temptations, have left to
posterity a doubtful and checkered fame.

SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH

(July 1835)
_History of the Revolution in England, in 1688. Comprising a View of the
Reign of James the Second from his Accession to the Enterprise of the
Prince of Orange, by the late Right Honourable Sir JAMES MACKINTOSH;
and completed to the Settlement of the Crown, by the Editor. To which
is prefixed a Notice of the Life, Writings, and Speeches of Sir James
Mackintosh. 4to. London: 1834._

[In this review, as it originally stood, the editor of the History of
the Revolution was attacked with an asperity which neither literary
defects nor speculative differences can justify, and which ought to
be reserved for offences against the laws of morality and honour. The
reviewer was not actuated by any feeling of personal malevolence: for
when he wrote this paper in a distant country, he did not know, or even
guess, whom he was assailing. His only motive was regard for the memory
of an eminent man whom he loved and honoured, and who appeared to him to
have been unworthily treated.

The editor is now dead; and, while living, declared that he had been
misunderstood, and that he had written in no spirit of enmity to Sir
James Mackintosh, for whom he professed the highest respect.

Many passages have therefore been softened, and some wholly omitted.
The severe censure passed on the literary execution of the “Memoir” and
“Continuation” could not be retracted without a violation of truth. But
whatever could be construed into an imputation on the moral character of
the editor has been carefully expunged.]

IT is with unfeigned diffidence that we venture to give our opinion of
the last work of Sir James Mackintosh. We have in vain tried to perform
what ought to be to a critic an easy and habitual act. We have in vain
tried to separate the book from the writer, and to judge of it as if it
bore some unknown name. But it is to no purpose. All the lines of that
venerable countenance are before us. All the little peculiar cadences
of that voice from which scholars and statesmen loved to receive the
lessons of a serene and benevolent wisdom are in our ears. We will
attempt to preserve strict impartiality. But we are not ashamed to own
that we approach this relic of a virtuous and most accomplished man
with feelings of respect and gratitude which may possibly pervert our
judgment.

It is hardly possible to avoid instituting a comparison between this
work and another celebrated Fragment. Our readers will easily guess that
we allude to Mr. Fox’s History of James the Second. The two books relate
to the same subject. Both were posthumously published. Neither had
received the last corrections. The authors belonged to the same
political party, and held the same opinions concerning the merits
and defects of the English constitution, and concerning most of the
prominent characters and events in English history. Both had
thought much on the principles of government; yet they were not mere
speculators. Both had ransacked the archives of rival kingdoms, and
pored on folios which had mouldered for ages in deserted libraries; yet
they were not mere antiquaries. They had one eminent qualification for
writing history: they had spoken history, acted history, lived history.
The turns of political fortune, the ebb and flow of popular feeling, the
hidden mechanism by which parties are moved, all these things were
the subjects of their constant thought and of their most familiar
conversation. Gibbon has remarked that he owed part of his success as
a historian to the observations which he had made as an officer in the
militia and as a member of the House of Commons. The remark is most
just. We have not the smallest doubt that his campaign, though he never
saw an enemy, and his parliamentary attendance, though he never made a
speech, were of far more use to him than years of retirement and study
would have been. If the time that he spent on parade and at mess in
Hampshire, or on the Treasury bench and at Brookes’s during the storms
which overthrew Lord North and Lord Shelburne, had been passed in the
Bodleian Library, he might have avoided some inaccuracies; he might have
enriched his notes with a greater number of references; but he would
never have produced so lively a picture of the court, the camp, and the
senate-house. In this respect Mr. Fox and Sir James Mackintosh had great
advantages over almost every English historian who has written since the
time of Burnet. Lord Lyttelton had indeed the same advantages; but he
was incapable of using them. Pedantry was so deeply fixed in his nature
that the hustings, the Treasury, the Exchequer, the House of Commons,
the House of Lords, left him the same dreaming schoolboy that they found
him.

When we compare the two interesting works of which we have been
speaking, we have little difficulty in giving the preference to that of
Sir James Mackintosh. Indeed, the superiority of Mr. Fox to Sir James as
an orator is hardly more clear than the superiority of Sir James to Mr.
Fox as a historian. Mr. Fox with a pen in his hand, and Sir James on
his legs in the House of Commons, were, we think, each out of his proper
element. They were men, it is true, of far too much judgment and ability
to fail scandalously in any undertaking to which they brought the whole
power of their minds. The History of James the Second will always keep
its place in our libraries as a valuable book; and Sir James
Mackintosh succeeded in winning and maintaining a high place among the
parliamentary speakers of his time. Yet we could never read a page of
Mr. Fox’s writing, we could never listen for a quarter of an hour to the
speaking of Sir James, without feeling that there was a constant effort,
a tug up hill. Nature, or habit which had become nature, asserted its
rights. Mr. Fox wrote debates. Sir James Mackintosh spoke essays.

As far as mere diction was concerned, indeed, Mr. Fox did his best
to avoid those faults which the habit of public speaking is likely
to generate. He was so nervously apprehensive of sliding into some
colloquial incorrectness, of debasing his style by a mixture of
parliamentary slang, that he ran into the opposite error, and purified
his vocabulary with a scrupulosity unknown to any purist. “Ciceronem
Allobroga dixit.” He would not allow Addison, Bolingbroke, or Middleton
to be a sufficient authority for an expression. He declared that he
would use no word which was not to be found in Dryden. In any other
person we should have called this solicitude mere foppery; and, in spite
of all our admiration for Mr. Fox, we cannot but think that his extreme
attention to the petty niceties of language was hardly worthy of so
manly and so capacious an understanding. There were purists of this
kind at Rome; and their fastidiousness was censured by Horace, with that
perfect good sense and good taste which characterise all his writings.
There were purists of this kind at the time of the revival of letters;
and the two greatest scholars of that time raised their voices, the one
from within, the other from without the Alps, against a scrupulosity so
unreasonable. “Carent,” said Politian, “quae scribunt isti viribus et
vita, carent actu, carent effectu, carent indole... Nisi liber ille
praesto sit ex quo quid excerpant, colligere tria verba non possunt...
Horum semper igitur oratio tremula, vacillans, infirma... Quaeso ne
ista superstitione te alliges... Ut bene currere non potest qui pedem
ponere studet in alienis tantum vestigiis, ita nec bene scribere qui
tanquam de praetscripto non audet egredi.”--“Posthac,” exclaims Erasmus,
“non licebit episcopos appellare patres reverendos, nec in calce
literarum scribere annum a Christo nato, quod id nusquam faciat Cicero.
Quid autem ineptius quam, toto seculo novato, religione, imperiis,
magistratibus, locorum vocabulis, aedificiis, cultu, moribus, non aliter
audere loqui quam locutus est Cicero? Si revivisceret ipse Cicero,
rideret hoc Ciceronianorum genus.”

While Mr. Fox winnowed and sifted his phraseology with a care which
seems hardly consistent with the simplicity and elevation of his mind,
and of which the effect really was to debase and enfeeble his style,
he was little on his guard against those more serious improprieties of
manner into which a great orator who undertakes to write history is
in danger of falling. There is about the whole book a vehement,
contentious, replying manner. Almost every argument is put in the form
of an interrogation, an ejaculation, or a sarcasm. The writer seems
to be addressing himself to some imaginary audience, to be tearing in
pieces a defence of the Stuarts which has just been pronounced by an
imaginary Tory. Take, for example, his answer to Hume’s remarks on the
execution of Sydney; and substitute “the honourable gentleman” or
“the noble Lord” for the name of Hume. The whole passage sounds like a
powerful reply, thundered at three in the morning from the Opposition
Bench. While we read it, we can almost fancy that we see and hear the
great English debater, such as he has been described to us by the
few who can still remember the Westminster scrutiny and the Oczakow
Negotiations, in the full paroxysm of inspiration, foaming, screaming,
choked by the rushing multitude of his words.

It is true that the passage to which we have referred, and several other
passages which we could point out, are admirable when considered merely
as exhibitions of mental power. We at once recognise in them that
consummate master of the whole art of intellectual gladiatorship, whose
speeches, imperfectly as they have been transmitted to us, should be
studied day and night by every man who wishes to learn the science of
logical defence. We find in several parts of the History of James the
Second fine specimens of that which we conceive to have been the great
characteristic Demosthenes among the Greeks, and of Fox among the
orators of England, reason penetrated, and, if we may venture on
the expression, made red-hot by passion. But this is not the kind of
excellence proper to history; and it is hardly too much to say that
whatever is strikingly good in Mr. Fox’s Fragment is out of place.

With Sir James Mackintosh the case was reversed. His proper place
was his library, a circle of men of letters, or a chair of moral and
political philosophy. He distinguished himself in Parliament. But
nevertheless Parliament was not exactly the sphere for him. The effect
of his most successful speeches was small when compared with the
quantity of ability and learning which was expended on them. We could
easily name men who, not possessing a tenth part of his intellectual
powers, hardly ever address the House of Commons without producing a
greater impression than was produced by his most splendid and elaborate
orations. His luminous and philosophical disquisition on the Reform
Bill was spoken to empty benches. Those, indeed, who had the wit to keep
their seats, picked up hints which, skilfully used, made the fortune
of more than one speech. But “it was caviare to the general.” And even
those who listened to Sir James with pleasure and admiration could not
but acknowledge that he rather lectured than debated. An artist who
should waste on a panorama, or a scene, or on a transparency, the
exquisite finishing which we admire in some of the small Dutch
interiors, would not squander his powers more than this eminent man too
often did. His audience resembled the boy in the Heart of Midlothian,
who pushes away the lady’s guineas with contempt, and insists on
having the white money. They preferred the silver with which they were
familiar, and which they were constantly passing about from hand to
hand, to the gold which they had never before seen, and with the value
of which they were unacquainted.

It is much to be regretted, we think, that Sir James Mackintosh did not
wholly devote his later years to philosophy and literature. His talents
were not those which enable a speaker to produce with rapidity a series
of striking but transitory impressions, and to excite the minds of five
hundred gentlemen at midnight, without saying anything that any one of
them will be able to remember in the morning. His arguments were of a
very different texture from those which are produced in Parliament at a
moment’s notice, which puzzle a plain man who, if he had them before him
in writing, would soon detect their fallacy, and which the great debater
who employs them forgets within half an hour, and never thinks of again.
Whatever was valuable in the compositions of Sir James Mackintosh was
the ripe fruit of study and of meditation. It was the same with his
conversation. In his most familiar talk there was no wildness, no
inconsistency, no amusing nonsense, no exaggeration for the sake of
momentary effect. His mind was a vast magazine, admirably arranged.
Everything was there; and everything was in its place. His judgments
on men, on sects, on books, had been often and carefully tested and
weighed, and had then been committed, each to its proper receptacle,
in the most capacious and accurately constructed memory that any human
being ever possessed. It would have been strange indeed if you had asked
for anything that was not to be found in that immense storehouse. The
article which you required was not only there. It was ready. It was in
its own proper compartment. In a moment it was brought down, unpacked,
and displayed. If those who enjoyed the privilege--for a privilege
indeed it was--of listening to Sir James Mackintosh had been disposed
to find some fault in his conversation, they might perhaps have observed
that he yielded too little to the impulse of the moment. He seemed to be
recollecting, not creating. He never appeared to catch a sudden glimpse
of a subject in a new light. You never saw his opinions in the making,
still rude, still inconsistent, and requiring to be fashioned by thought
and discussion. They came forth, like the pillars of that temple in
which no sound of axes or hammers was heard, finished, rounded, and
exactly suited to their places. What Mr. Charles Lamb has said, with
much humour and some truth, of the conversation of Scotchmen in general,
was certainly true of this eminent Scotchman. He did not find, but
bring. You could not cry halves to anything that turned up while you
were in his company.

The intellectual and moral qualities which are most important in a
historian, he possessed in a very high degree. He was singularly mild,
calm, and impartial in his judgments of men, and of parties. Almost
all the distinguished writers who have treated of English history are
advocates. Mr. Hallam and Sir James Mackintosh alone are entitled to
be called judges. But the extreme austerity of Mr. Hallam takes away
something from the pleasure of reading his learned, eloquent, and
judicious writings. He is a judge, but a hanging judge, the Page or
Buller of the High Court of Literary justice. His black cap is in
constant requisition. In the long calendar of those whom he has tried,
there is hardly one who has not, in spite of evidence to character and
recommendations to mercy, been sentenced and left for execution. Sir
James, perhaps, erred a little on the other side. He liked a maiden
assize, and came away with white gloves, after sitting in judgment on
batches of the most notorious offenders. He had a quick eye for
the redeeming parts of a character, and a large toleration for the
infirmities of men exposed to strong temptations. But this lenity did
not arise from ignorance or neglect of moral distinctions. Though he
allowed perhaps too much weight to every extenuating circumstance that
could be urged in favour of the transgressor, he never disputed the
authority of the law, or showed his ingenuity by refining away its
enactments. On every occasion he showed himself firm where principles
were in question, but full of charity towards individuals.

We have no hesitation in pronouncing this Fragment decidedly the best
history now extant of the reign of James the Second. It contains much
new and curious information, of which excellent use has been made. But
we are not sure that the book is not in some degree open to the charge
which the idle citizen in the Spectator brought against his pudding;
“Mem. too many plums, and no suet.” There is perhaps too much
disquisition and too little narrative; and indeed this is the fault
into which, judging from the habits of Sir James’s mind, we should have
thought him most likely to fall. What we assuredly did not anticipate
was, that the narrative would be better executed than the disquisitions.
We expected to find, and we have found, many just delineations of
character, and many digressions full of interest, such as the account of
the order of Jesuits, and of the state of prison discipline in England
a hundred and fifty years ago. We expected to find, and we have
found, many reflections breathing the spirit of a calm and benignant
philosophy. But we did not, we own, expect to find that Sir James could
tell a story as well as Voltaire or Hume. Yet such is the fact; and if
any person doubts it, we would advise him to read the account of the
events which followed the issuing of King James’s declaration, the
meeting of the clergy, the violent scene at the privy council, the
commitment, trial, and acquittal of the bishops. The most superficial
reader must be charmed, we think, by the liveliness of the narrative.
But no person who is not acquainted with that vast mass of intractable
materials of which the valuable and interesting part has been extracted
and condensed can fully appreciate the skill of the writer. Here, and
indeed throughout the book, we find many harsh and careless expressions
which the author would probably have removed if he had lived to complete
his work. But, in spite of these blemishes, we must say that we should
find it difficult to point out, in any modern history, any passage of
equal length and at the same time of equal merit. We find in it the
diligence, the accuracy, and the judgment of Hallam, united to the
vivacity and the colouring of Southey. A history of England, written
throughout in this manner, would be the most fascinating book in the
language. It would be more in request at the circulating libraries than
the last novel.

Sir James was not, we think, gifted with poetical imagination. But that
lower kind of imagination which is necessary to the historian he had
in large measure. It is not the business of the historian to create new
worlds and to people them with new races of beings. He is to Homer
and Shakspeare, to Dante and Milton, what Nollekens was to Canova, or
Lawrence to Michael Angelo. The object of the historian’s imitation
is not within him; it is furnished from without. It is not a vision of
beauty and grandeur discernible only by the eye of his own mind, but a
real model which he did not make, and which he cannot alter. Yet his is
not a mere mechanical imitation. The triumph of his skill is to select
such parts as may produce the effect of the whole, to bring out strongly
all the characteristic features, and to throw the light and shade in
such a manner as may heighten the effect. This skill, as far as we
can judge from the unfinished work now before us, Sir James Mackintosh
possessed in an eminent degree.

The style of this Fragment is weighty, manly, and unaffected. There are,
as we have said, some expressions which seem to us harsh, and some which
we think inaccurate. These would probably have been corrected, if Sir
James had lived to superintend the publication. We ought to add that the
printer has by no means done his duty. One misprint in particular is so
serious as to require notice. Sir James Mackintosh has paid a high and
just tribute to the genius, the integrity, and the courage of a good and
great man, a distinguished ornament of English literature, a fearless
champion of English liberty, Thomas Burnet, Master of the Charter-House,
and author of the most eloquent and imaginative work, the Telluris
Theoria Sacra. Wherever the name of this celebrated man occurs, it is
printed “Bennet,” both in the text and in the index. This cannot be mere
negligence. It is plain that Thomas Burnet and his writings were never
heard of by the gentleman who has been employed to edit this volume,
and who, not content with deforming Sir James Mackintosh’s text by such
blunders, has prefixed to it a bad Memoir, has appended to it a bad
continuation, and has thus succeeded in expanding the volume into one
of the thickest, and debasing it into one of the worst that we ever saw.
Never did we fall in with so admirable an illustration of the old Greek
proverb, which tells us that half is sometimes more than the whole.
Never did we see a case in which the increase of the bulk was so
evidently a diminution of the value.

Why such an artist was selected to deface so fine a Torso, we cannot
pretend to conjecture. We read that, when the Consul Mummius, after
the taking of Corinth, was preparing to send to Rome some works of the
greatest Grecian sculptors, he told the packers that if they broke his
Venus or his Apollo, he would force them to restore the limbs which
should be wanting. A head by a hewer of milestones joined to a bosom by
Praxiteles would not surprise or shock us more than this supplement.

The “Memoir” contains much that is worth reading; for it contains many
extracts from the compositions of Sir James Mackintosh. But when we pass
from what the biographer has done with his scissors to what he has done
with his pen, we can find nothing to praise in his work. Whatever
may have been the intention with which he wrote, the tendency of his
narrative is to convey the impression that Sir James Mackintosh, from
interested motives, abandoned the doctrines of the Vindiciae Gallicae.
Had such charges appeared in their natural place, we should leave them
to their natural fate. We would not stoop to defend Sir James Mackintosh
from the attacks of fourth-rate magazines and pothouse newspapers. But
here his own fame is turned against him. A book of which not one copy
would ever have been bought but for his name in the title-page is made
the vehicle of the imputation. Under such circumstances we cannot help
exclaiming, in the words of one of the most amiable of Homer’s heroes,

               “Nun tis enieies

               Patroklios deilio

               Mnisastho pasin gar epistato meilichos einai

               Zoos eun’ nun d’ au

               Thanatos kai Moira kichanei.”

We have no difficulty in admitting that during the ten or twelve years
which followed the appearance of the Vindicae Gallicae, the opinions of
Sir James Mackintosh underwent some change. But did this change pass on
him alone? Was it not common? Was it not almost universal? Was there one
honest friend of liberty in Europe or in America whose ardour had not
been damped, whose faith in the high destinies of mankind had not
been shaken? Was there one observer to whom the French Revolution, or
revolutions in general, appeared in exactly the same light on the day
when the Bastile fell, and on the day when the Girondists were dragged
to the scaffold, the day when the Directory shipped off their principal
opponents for Guiana, or the day when the Legislative Body was
driven from its hall at the point of the bayonet? We do not speak of
light-minded and enthusiastic people, of wits like Sheridan, or poets
like Alfieri; but of the most virtuous and intelligent practical
statesmen, and of the deepest, the calmest, the most impartial political
speculators of that time. What was the language and conduct of Lord
Spencer, of Lord Fitzwilliam, or Mr. Grattan? What is the tone of M.
Dumont’s Memoirs, written just at the close of the eighteenth century?
What Tory could have spoken with greater disgust or contempt of the
French Revolution and its authors? Nay, this writer, a republican, and
the most upright and zealous of republicans, has gone so far as to say
that Mr. Burke’s work on the Revolution had saved Europe. The name of M.
Dumont naturally suggests that of Mr. Bentham. He, we presume, was not
ratting for a place; and what language did he hold at that time? Look at
his little treatise entitled Sophismes Anarchiques. In that treatise
he says, that the atrocities of the Revolution were the natural
consequences of the absurd principles on which it was commenced; that,
while the chiefs of the constituent assembly gloried in the thought that
they were pulling down aristocracy, they never saw that their doctrines
tended to produce an evil a hundred times more formidable, anarchy; that
the theory laid down in the Declaration of the Rights of Man had, in a
great measure, produced the crimes of the Reign of Terror; that none but
an eyewitness could imagine the horrors of a state of society in which
comments on that Declaration were put forth by men with no food in their
bellies, with rags on their backs and pikes in their hands. He praises
the English Parliament for the dislike which it has always shown to
abstract reasonings, and to the affirming of general principles. In M.
Dumont’s preface to the Treatise on the Principles of Legislation, a
preface written under the eye of Mr. Bentham, and published with his
sanction, are the following still more remarkable expressions: “M.
Bentham est bien loin d’attacher une préférence exclusive a aucune forme
de gouvernement. Il pense que la meilleure constitution pour un peuple
est celle a laquelle il est accoutume... Le vice fondamental des
théories sur les constitutions politiques, c’est de commencer par
attaquer celles qui existent, et d’exciter tout au moins des inquiétudes
et des jalousies de pouvoir. Une telle disposition n’est point
favorable au perfectionnement des lois. La seule époque ou l’on puisse
entreprendre avec succes des grandes reformes de législation est celle
ou les passions publiques sont calmes, et ou le gouvernement jouit de
la stabilité la plus grande. L’objet de M. Bentham, en cherchant dans
le vice des lois la cause de la plupart des maux, a été constamment
d’éloigner le plus grand de tous, le bouleversement de l’autorite, les
révolutions de propriété et de pouvoir.”

To so conservative a frame of mind had the excesses of the French
Revolution brought the most illustrious reformers of that time. And
why is one person to be singled out from among millions, and arraigned
before posterity as a traitor to his opinions only because events
produced on him the effect which they produced on a whole generation?
People who, like Mr. Brothers in the last generation, and Mr. Percival
in this, have been favoured with revelations from heaven, may be quite
independent of the vulgar sources of knowledge. But such poor creatures
as Mackintosh, Dumont, and Bentham, had nothing but observation and
reason to guide them; and they obeyed the guidance of observation and of
reason. How is it in physics? A traveller falls in with a berry which he
has never before seen. He tastes it, and finds it sweet and refreshing.
He praises it, and resolves to introduce it into his own country. But in
a few minutes he is taken violently sick; he is convulsed; he is at
the point of death. He of course changes his opinion, denounces this
delicious food a poison, blames his own folly in tasting it, and
cautions his friends against it. After a long and violent struggle he
recovers, and finds himself much exhausted by his sufferings, but free
from some chronic complaints which had been the torment of his life.
He then changes his opinion again, and pronounces this fruit a very
powerful remedy, which ought to be employed only in extreme cases and
with great caution, but which ought not to be absolutely excluded from
the Pharmacopoeia. And would it not be the height of absurdity to call
such a man fickle and inconsistent, because he had repeatedly altered
his judgment? If he had not altered his judgment, would he have been a
rational being? It was exactly the same with the French Revolution. That
event was a new phaenomenon in politics. Nothing that had gone before
enabled any person to judge with certainty of the course which affairs
might take. At first the effect was the reform of great abuses; and
honest men rejoiced. Then came commotion, proscription, confiscation,
bankruptcy, the assignats, the maximum, civil war, foreign war,
revolutionary tribunals, guillotinades, noyades, fusillades. Yet a
little while, and a military despotism rose out of the confusion, and
menaced the independence of every state in Europe.

And yet again a little while, and the old dynasty returned, followed by
a train of emigrants eager to restore the old abuses. We have now, we
think, the whole before us. We should therefore be justly accused of
levity or insincerity if our language concerning those events were
constantly changing. It is our deliberate opinion that the French
Revolution, in spite of all its crimes and follies, was a great blessing
to mankind. But it was not only natural, but inevitable, that those who
had only seen the first act should be ignorant of the catastrophe,
and should be alternately elated and depressed as the plot went on
disclosing itself to them. A man who had held exactly the same opinion
about the Revolution in 1789, in 1794, in 1804, in 1814, and in 1834,
would have been either a divinely inspired prophet, or an obstinate
fool. Mackintosh was neither. He was simply a wise and good man; and the
change which passed on his mind was a change which passed on the mind
of almost every wise and good man in Europe. In fact, few of his
contemporaries changed so little. The rare moderation and calmness
of his temper preserved him alike from extravagant elation and from
extravagant despondency. He was never a Jacobin. He was never an
Anti-Jacobin. His mind oscillated undoubtedly, but the extreme points
of the oscillation were not very remote. Herein he differed greatly from
some persons of distinguished talents who entered into life at nearly
the same time with him. Such persons we have seen rushing from one wild
extreme to another, out-Paining Paine, out-Castlereaghing Castlereagh,
Pantisocratists, Ultra-Tories, heretics, persecutors, breaking the
old laws against sedition, calling for new and sharper laws against
sedition, writing democratic dramas, writing Laureate odes panegyrising
Marten, panegyrising Laud, consistent in nothing but an intolerance
which in any person would be censurable, but which is altogether
unpardonable in men who, by their own confession, have had such ample
experience of their own fallibility. We readily concede to some of these
persons the praise of eloquence and poetical invention; nor are we
by any means disposed, even where they have been gainers by their
conversion, to question their sincerity. It would be most uncandid to
attribute to sordid motives actions which admit of a less discreditable
explanation. We think that the conduct of these persons has been
precisely what was to be expected from men who were gifted with strong
imagination and quick sensibility, but who were neither accurate
observers nor logical reasoners. It was natural that such men should see
in the victory of the third estate of France the dawn of a new Saturnian
age. It was natural that the rage of their disappointment should be
proportioned to the extravagance of their hopes. Though the direction of
their passions was altered, the violence of those passions was the same.
The force of the rebound was proportioned to the force of the original
impulse. The pendulum swung furiously to the left, because it had been
drawn too far to the right.

We own that nothing gives us so high an idea of the judgment and temper
of Sir James Mackintosh as the manner in which he shaped his course
through those times. Exposed successively to two opposite infections, he
took both in their very mildest form. The constitution of his mind was
such that neither of the diseases which wrought such havoc all round him
could in any serious degree, or for any great length of time, derange
his intellectual health. He, like every honest and enlightened man in
Europe, saw with delight the great awakening of the French nation. Yet
he never, in the season of his warmest enthusiasm, proclaimed doctrines
inconsistent with the safety of property and the just authority of
governments. He, like almost every other honest and enlightened man, was
discouraged and perplexed by the terrible events which followed. Yet he
never in the most gloomy times abandoned the cause of peace, of liberty,
and of toleration. In that great convulsion which overset almost
every other understanding, he was indeed so much shaken that he leaned
sometimes in one direction and sometimes in the other; but he never lost
his balance. The opinions in which he at last reposed, and to which, in
spite of strong temptations, he adhered with a firm, a disinterested,
an ill-requited fidelity, were a just mean between those which he had
defended with youthful ardour and with more than manly prowess against
Mr. Burke, and those to which he had inclined during the darkest and
saddest years in the history of modern Europe. We are much mistaken if
this be the picture either of a weak or of a dishonest mind.

What the political opinions of Sir James Mackintosh were in his later
years is written in the annals of his country. Those annals will
sufficiently refute what the Editor has ventured to assert in the
very advertisement to this work. “Sir James Mackintosh,” says he,
“was avowedly and emphatically a Whig of the Revolution: and since
the agitation of religious liberty and parliamentary reform became
a national movement, the great transaction of 1688 has been more
dispassionately, more correctly, and less highly estimated.” If these
words mean anything, they must mean that the opinions of Sir James
Mackintosh concerning religious liberty and parliamentary reform went
no further than those of the authors of the Revolution; in other words,
that Sir James Mackintosh opposed Catholic Emancipation, and approved of
the old constitution of the House of Commons. The allegation is confuted
by twenty volumes of Parliamentary Debates, nay, by innumerable passages
in the very fragment which this writer has defaced. We will venture to
say that Sir James Mackintosh often did more for religious liberty and
for parliamentary reform in a quarter of an hour than most of those
zealots who are in the habit of depreciating him have done or will do in
the whole course of their lives.

Nothing in the “Memoir” or in the “Continuation of the History” has
struck us so much as the contempt with which the writer thinks fit to
speak of all things that were done before the coming in of the very last
fashions in politics. We think that we have sometimes observed a leaning
towards the same fault in writers of a much higher order of intellect.
We will therefore take this opportunity of making a few remarks on an
error which is, we fear, becoming common, and which appears to us
not only absurd, but as pernicious as almost any error concerning the
transactions of a past age can possibly be.

We shall not, we hope, be suspected of a bigoted attachment to the
doctrines and practices of past generations. Our creed is that the
science of government is an experimental science, and that, like all
other experimental sciences, it is generally in a state of progression.
No man is so obstinate an admirer of the old times as to deny that
medicine, surgery, botany, chemistry, engineering, navigation, are
better understood now than in any former age. We conceive that it is the
same with political science. Like those physical sciences which we have
mentioned, it has always been working itself clearer and clearer, and
depositing impurity after impurity. There was a time when the most
powerful of human intellects were deluded by the gibberish of the
astrologer and the alchemist; and just so there was a time when the
most enlightened and virtuous statesmen thought it the first duty of a
government to persecute heretics, to found monasteries, to make war
on Saracens. But time advances; facts accumulate; doubts arise. Faint
glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more unto the
perfect day. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the
first to catch and to reflect the dawn. They are bright, while the
level below is still in darkness. But soon the light, which at first
illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain and
penetrates to the deepest valley. First come hints, then fragments of
systems, then defective systems, then complete and harmonious systems.
The sound opinion, held for a time by one bold speculator, becomes the
opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority of
mankind. Thus, the great progress goes on, till schoolboys laugh at
the jargon which imposed on Bacon, till country rectors condemn the
illiberality and intolerance of Sir Thomas More.

Seeing these things, seeing that, by the confession of the most
obstinate enemies of innovation, our race has hitherto been almost
constantly advancing in knowledge, and not seeing any reason to believe
that, precisely at the point of time at which we came into the world, a
change took place in the faculties of the human mind, or in the mode
of discovering truth, we are reformers: we are on the side of progress.
From the great advances which European society has made during the last
four centuries, in every species of knowledge, we infer, not that
there is no more room for improvement, but that, in every science which
deserves the name, immense improvements may be confidently expected.

But the very considerations which lead us to look forward with sanguine
hope to the future prevent us from looking back with contempt on the
past We do not flatter ourselves with the notion that we have attained
perfection, and that no more truth remains to be found. We believe that
we are wiser than our ancestors. We believe, also, that our posterity
will be wiser than we. It would be gross injustice in our grandchildren
to talk of us with contempt, merely because they may have surpassed us;
to call Watt a fool, because mechanical powers may be discovered which
may supersede the use of steam; to deride the efforts which have been
made in our time to improve the discipline of prisons, and to enlighten
the minds of the poor, because future philanthropists may devise better
places of confinement than Mr. Bentham’s Panopticon, and better
places of education than Mr. Lancaster’s Schools. As we would have our
descendants judge us, so ought we to judge our fathers. In order to form
a correct estimate of their merits, we ought to place ourselves in their
situation, to put out of our minds, for a time, all that knowledge which
they, however eager in the pursuit of truth, could not have, and which
we, however negligent we may have been, could not help having. It
was not merely difficult, but absolutely impossible, for the best and
greatest of men, two hundred years ago, to be what a very commonplace
person in our days may easily be, and indeed must necessarily be. But it
is too much that the benefactors of mankind, after having been reviled
by the dunces of their own generation for going too far, should be
reviled by the dunces of the next generation for not going far enough.

The truth lies between two absurd extremes. On one side is the bigot who
pleads the wisdom of our ancestors as a reason for not doing what they
in our place would be the first to do; who opposes the Reform Bill
because Lord Somers did not see the necessity of Parliamentary Reform;
who would have opposed the Revolution because Ridley and Cranmer
professed boundless submission to the royal prerogative; and who would
have opposed the Reformation because the Fitzwalters and Mareschals,
whose seals are set to the Great Charter, were devoted adherents to the
Church of Rome. On the other side is the sciolist who speaks with
scorn of the Great Charter because it did not reform the Church of
the Reformation, because it did not limit the prerogative; and of the
Revolution, because it did not purify the House of Commons. The former
of these errors we have often combated, and shall always be ready to
combat. The latter, though rapidly spreading, has not, we think, yet
come under our notice. The former error bears directly on practical
questions, and obstructs useful reforms. It may, therefore, seem to
be, and probably is, the more mischievous of the two. But the latter
is equally absurd; it is at least equally symptomatic of a shallow
understanding and an unamiable temper: and, if it should ever become
general, it will, we are satisfied, produce very prejudicial effects.
Its tendency is to deprive the benefactors of mankind of their honest
fame, and to put the best and the worst men of past times on the same
level. The author of a great reformation is almost always unpopular in
his own age. He generally passes his life in disquiet and danger. It is
therefore for the interest of the human race that the memory of such men
should be had in reverence, and that they should be supported against
the scorn and hatred of their contemporaries by the hope of leaving a
great and imperishable name. To go on the forlorn hope of truth is a
service of peril. Who will undertake it, if it be not also a service of
honour? It is easy enough, after the ramparts are carried, to find men
to plant the flag on the highest tower. The difficulty is to find men
who are ready to go first into the breach; and it would be bad policy
indeed to insult their remains because they fell in the breach, and did
not live to penetrate to the citadel.

Now here we have a book which is by no means a favourable specimen of
the English literature of the nineteenth century, a book indicating
neither extensive knowledge nor great powers of reasoning. And, if we
were to judge by the pity with which the writer speaks of the great
statesmen and philosophers of a former age, we should guess that he was
the author of the most original and important inventions in political
science. Yet not so: for men who are able to make discoveries are
generally disposed to make allowances. Men who are eagerly pressing
forward in pursuit of truth are grateful to every one who has cleared an
inch of the way for them. It is, for the most part, the man who has
just capacity enough to pick up and repeat the commonplaces which
are fashionable in his own time who looks with disdain on the very
intellects to which it is owing that those commonplaces are not still
considered as startling paradoxes or damnable heresies. This writer is
just the man who, if he had lived in the seventeenth century, would
have devoutly believed that the Papists burned London, who would have
swallowed the whole of Oates’s story about the forty thousand soldiers,
disguised as pilgrims, who were to meet in Gallicia, and sail thence
to invade England, who would have carried a Protestant flail under his
coat, and who would have been angry if the story of the warming-pan had
been questioned. It is quite natural that such a man should speak with
contempt of the great reformers of that time, because they did not know
some things which he never would have known but for the salutary effects
of their exertions. The men to whom we owe it that we have a House of
Commons are sneered at because they did not suffer the debates of the
House to be published. The authors of the Toleration Act are treated
as bigots, because they did not go the whole length of Catholic
Emancipation. Just so we have heard a baby, mounted on the shoulders of
its father, cry out, “How much taller I am than Papa!”

This gentleman can never want matter for pride, if he finds it so
easily. He may boast of an indisputable superiority to all the greatest
men of all past ages. He can read and write: Homer probably did not
know a letter. He has been taught that the earth goes round the sun:
Archimedes held that the sun went round the earth. He is aware that
there is a place called New Holland: Columbus and Gama went to their
graves in ignorance of the fact. He has heard of the Georgium Sidus:
Newton was ignorant of the existence of such a planet. He is acquainted
with the use of gunpowder: Hannibal and Caesar won their victories with
sword and spear. We submit, however, that this is not the way in which
men are to be estimated. We submit that a wooden spoon of our day would
not be justified in calling Galileo and Napier blockheads, because they
never heard of the differential calculus. We submit that Caxton’s press
in Westminster Abbey, rude as it is, ought to be looked at with quite as
much respect as the best constructed machinery that ever, in our
time, impressed the clearest type on the finest paper. Sydenham first
discovered that the cool regimen succeeded best in cases of small-pox.
By this discovery he saved the lives of hundreds of thousands; and we
venerate his memory for it, though he never heard of inoculation. Lady
Mary Montague brought inoculation into use; and we respect her for it,
though she never heard of vaccination. Jenner introduced vaccination; we
admire him for it, and we shall continue to admire him for it, although
some still safer and more agreeable preservative should be discovered.
It is thus that we ought to judge of the events and the men of other
times. They were behind us. It could not be otherwise. But the question
with respect to them is not where they were, but which way they were
going. Were their faces set in the right or in the wrong direction? Were
they in the front or in the rear of their generation? Did they exert
themselves to help onward the great movement of the human race, or to
stop it? This is not charity, but simple justice and common sense. It is
the fundamental law of the world in which we live that truth shall grow,
first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. A
person who complains of the men of 1688 for not having been men of 1835
might just as well complain of a projectile for describing a parabola,
or of quicksilver for being heavier than water.

Undoubtedly we ought to look at ancient transactions by the light
of modern knowledge. Undoubtedly it is among the first duties of
a historian to point out the faults of the eminent men of former
generations. There are no errors which are so likely to be drawn into
precedent, and therefore none which it is so necessary to expose, as the
errors of persons who have a just title to the gratitude and admiration
of posterity. In politics, as in religion, there are devotees who show
their reverence for a departed saint by converting his tomb into a
sanctuary for crime. Receptacles of wickedness are suffered to remain
undisturbed in the neighbourhood of the church which glories in the
relics of some martyred apostle. Because he was merciful, his bones give
security to assassins. Because he was chaste, the precinct of his temple
is filled with licensed stews. Privileges of an equally absurd kind
have been set up against the jurisdiction of political philosophy. Vile
abuses cluster thick round every glorious event, round every venerable
name; and this evil assuredly calls for vigorous measures of literary
police. But the proper course is to abate the nuisance without defacing
the shrine, to drive out the gangs of thieves and prostitutes without
doing foul and cowardly wrong to the ashes of the illustrious dead.

In this respect, two historians of our own time may be proposed as
models, Sir James Mackintosh and Mr. Mill. Differing in most things, in
this they closely resemble each other. Sir James is lenient. Mr. Mill
is severe. But neither of them ever omits, in the apportioning of praise
and of censure, to make ample allowance for the state of political
science and political morality in former ages. In the work before
us, Sir James Mackintosh speaks with just respect of the Whigs of the
Revolution, while he never fails to condemn the conduct of that party
towards the members of the Church of Rome. His doctrines are the liberal
and benevolent doctrines of the nineteenth century. But he never forgets
that the men whom he is describing were men of the seventeenth century.

From Mr. Mill this indulgence, or, to speak more properly, this justice,
was less to be expected. That gentleman, in some of his works, appears
to consider politics not as an experimental, and therefore a progressive
science, but as a science of which all the difficulties may be resolved
by short synthetical arguments drawn from truths of the most vulgar
notoriety. Were this opinion well founded, the people of one generation
would have little or no advantage over those of another generation.
But though Mr. Mill, in some of his Essays, has been thus misled, as we
conceive, by a fondness for neat and precise forms of demonstration,
it would be gross injustice not to admit that, in his History, he has
employed a very different method of investigation with eminent ability
and success. We know no writer who takes so much pleasure in the truly
useful, noble and philosophical employment of tracing the progress
of sound opinions from their embryo state to their full maturity. He
eagerly culls from old despatches and minutes every expression in which
he can discern the imperfect germ of any great truth which has since
been fully developed. He never fails to bestow praise on those who,
though far from coming up to his standard of perfection, yet rose in a
small degree above the common level of their contemporaries. It is
thus that the annals of past times ought to be written. It is thus,
especially, that the annals of our own country ought to be written.

The history of England is emphatically the history of progress. It is
the history of a constant movement of the public mind, of a constant
change in the institutions of a great society. We see that society, at
the beginning of the twelfth century, in a state more miserable than the
state in which the most degraded nations of the East now are. We see
it subjected to the tyranny of a handful of armed foreigners. We see a
strong distinction of caste separating the victorious Norman from the
vanquished Saxon. We see the great body of the population in a state
of personal slavery. We see the most debasing and cruel superstition
exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and benevolent
minds. We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance, and the studious
few engaged in acquiring what did not deserve the name of knowledge. In
the course of seven centuries the wretched and degraded race have become
the greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world
saw, have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe, have
scattered the seeds of mighty empires and republics over vast continents
of which no dim intimation had ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo, have
created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour
the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa together,
have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and
correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, everything that
promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors
would have thought magical, have produced a literature which may boast
of works not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to
us, have discovered the laws which regulate the motions of the heavenly
bodies, have speculated with exquisite subtilty on the operations of the
human mind, have been the acknowledged leaders of the human race in the
career of political improvement. The history of England is the history
of this great change in the moral, intellectual, and physical state of
the inhabitants of our own island. There is much amusing and instructive
episodical matter; but this is the main action. To us, we will own,
nothing is so interesting and delightful as to contemplate the steps by
which the England of Domesday Book, the England of the Curfew and the
Forest Laws, the England of crusaders, monks, schoolmen, astrologers,
serfs, outlaws, became the England which we know and love, the classic
ground of liberty and philosophy, the school of all knowledge, the mart
of all trade. The Charter of Henry Beauclerk, the Great Charter, the
first assembling of the House of Commons, the extinction of personal
slavery, the separation from the See of Rome, the Petition of Right, the
Habeas Corpus Act, the Revolution, the establishment of the liberty of
unlicensed printing, the abolition of religious disabilities, the reform
of the representative system, all these seem to us to be the successive
stages of one great revolution--nor can we fully comprehend any one of
these memorable events unless we look at it in connection with those
which preceded, and with those which followed it. Each of those great
and ever-memorable struggles, Saxon against Norman, Villein against
Lord, Protestant against Papist, Roundhead against Cavalier, Dissenter
against Churchman, Manchester against Old Sarum, was, in its own order
and season, a struggle, on the result of which were staked the dearest
interests of the human race; and every man who, in the contest which, in
his time, divided our country, distinguished himself on the right side,
is entitled to our gratitude and respect.

Whatever the editor of this book may think, those persons who estimate
most correctly the value of the improvements which have recently
been made in our institutions are precisely the persons who are least
disposed to speak slightingly of what was done in 1688. Such men
consider the Revolution as a reform, imperfect indeed, but still most
beneficial to the English people and to the human race, as a reform,
which has been the fruitful parent of reforms, as a reform, the happy
effects of which are at this moment felt, not only throughout our own
country, but in half the monarchies of Europe, and in the depth of the
forests of Ohio. We shall be pardoned, we hope, if we call the attention
of our readers to the causes and to the consequences of that great
event.

We said that the history of England is the history of progress; and,
when we take a comprehensive view of it, it is so. But, when examined in
small separate portions, it may with more propriety be called a history
of actions and reactions. We have often thought that the motion of the
public mind in our country resembles that of the sea when the tide is
rising. Each successive wave rushes forward, breaks, and rolls back; but
the great flood is steadily coming in. A person who looked on the waters
only for a moment might fancy that they were retiring. A person who
looked on them only for five minutes might fancy that they were rushing
capriciously to and fro. But when he keeps his eye on them for a
quarter of an hour, and sees one seamark disappear after another, it is
impossible for him to doubt of the general direction in which the ocean
is moved. Just such has been the course of events in England. In the
history of the national mind, which is, in truth, the history of
the nation, we must carefully distinguish between that recoil which
regularly follows every advance and a great general ebb. If we take
short intervals, if we compare 1640 and 1660, 1680 and 1685, 1708 and
1712, 1782 and 1794, we find a retrogression. But if we take centuries,
if, for example, we compare 1794 with 1660 or with 1685, we cannot doubt
in which direction society is proceeding.

The interval which elapsed between the Restoration and the Revolution
naturally divides itself into three periods. The first extends from 1660
to 1678, the second from 1678 to 1681, the third from 1681 to 1688.

In 1660 the whole nation was mad with loyal excitement. If we had to
choose a lot from among all the multitude of those which men have drawn
since the beginning of the world, we would select that of Charles the
Second on the day of his return. He was in a situation in which the
dictates of ambition coincided with those of benevolence, in which it
was easier to be virtuous than to be wicked, to be loved than to be
hated, to earn pure and imperishable glory than to become infamous. For
once the road of goodness was a smooth descent. He had done nothing
to merit the affection of his people. But they had paid him in advance
without measure. Elizabeth, after the destruction of the Armada, or
after the abolition of monopolies, had not excited a thousandth part of
the enthusiasm with which the young exile was welcomed home. He was
not, like Lewis the Eighteenth, imposed on his subjects by foreign
conquerors; nor did he, like Lewis the Eighteenth, come back to a
country which had undergone a complete change. The House of Bourbon
was placed in Paris as a trophy of the victory of the European
confederation. The return of the ancient princes was inseparably
associated in the public mind with the cession of extensive provinces,
with the payment of an immense tribute, with the devastation of
flourishing departments, with the occupation of the kingdom by hostile
armies, with the emptiness of those niches in which the gods of Athens
and Rome had been the objects of a new idolatry, with the nakedness
of those walls on which the Transfiguration had shone with light as
glorious as that which overhung Mount Tabor. They came back to a land
in which they could recognise nothing. The seven sleepers of the legend,
who closed their eyes when the Pagans were persecuting the Christians,
and woke when the Christians were persecuting each other, did not find
themselves in a world more completely new to them. Twenty years had done
the work of twenty generations. Events had come thick. Men had lived
fast. The old institutions and the old feelings had been torn up by the
roots. There was a new Church founded and endowed by the usurper; a new
nobility whose titles were taken from fields of battle, disastrous to
the ancient line; a new chivalry whose crosses had been won by exploits
which had seemed likely to make the banishment of the emigrants
perpetual. A new code was administered by a new magistracy. A new body
of proprietors held the soil by a new tenure. The most ancient local
distinctions had been effaced. The most familiar names had become
obsolete. There was no longer a Normandy or a Burgundy, a Brittany and a
Guienne. The France of Lewis the Sixteenth had passed away as completely
as one of the Preadamite worlds. Its fossil remains might now and then
excite curiosity. But it was as impossible to put life into the old
institutions as to animate the skeletons which are imbedded in the
depths of primeval strata. It was as absurd to think that France could
again be placed under the feudal system, as that our globe could be
overrun by Mammoths. The revolution in the laws and in the form of
government was but an outward sign of that mightier revolution which
had taken place in the heart and brain of the people, and which affected
every transaction of life, trading, farming, studying, marrying, and
giving in marriage. The French whom the emigrant prince had to govern
were no more like the French of his youth, than the French of his youth
were like the French of the Jacquerie. He came back to a people who knew
not him nor his house, to a people to whom a Bourbon was no more than
a Carlovingian or a Merovingian. He might substitute the white flag for
the tricolor; he might put lilies in the place of bees; he might order
the initials of the Emperor to be carefully effaced. But he could turn
his eyes nowhere without meeting some object which reminded him that he
was a stranger in the palace of his fathers. He returned to a country in
which even the passing traveller is every moment reminded that there has
lately been a great dissolution and reconstruction of the social system.
To win the hearts of a people under such circumstances would have been
no easy task even for Henry the Fourth.

In the English Revolution the case was altogether different. Charles was
not imposed on his countrymen, but sought by them. His restoration was
not attended by any circumstance which could inflict a wound on their
national pride. Insulated by our geographical position, insulated by
our character, we had fought out our quarrels and effected our
reconciliation among ourselves. Our great internal questions had never
been mixed up with the still greater question of national independence.
The political doctrines of the Roundheads were not, like those of the
French philosophers, doctrines of universal application. Our ancestors,
for the most part, took their stand, not on a general theory, but on the
particular constitution of the realm. They asserted the rights, not of
men, but of Englishmen. Their doctrines therefore were not contagious;
and, had it been otherwise, no neighbouring country was then susceptible
of the contagion. The language in which our discussions were generally
conducted was scarcely known even to a single man of letters out of the
islands. Our local situation made it almost impossible that we should
effect great conquests on the Continent. The kings of Europe had,
therefore, no reason to fear that their subjects would follow the
example of the English Puritans, and looked with indifference, perhaps
with complacency, on the death of the monarch and the abolition of the
monarchy. Clarendon complains bitterly of their apathy. But we believe
that this apathy was of the greatest service to the royal cause. If a
French or Spanish army had invaded England, and if that army had been
cut to pieces, as we have no doubt that it would have been, on the
first day on which it came face to face with the soldiers of Preston
and Dunbar, with Colonel Fight-the-good-Fight, and Captain
Smite-them-hip-and-thigh, the House of Cromwell would probably now
have been reigning in England. The nation would have forgotten all the
misdeeds of the man who had cleared the soil of foreign invaders.

Happily for Charles, no European state, even when at war with the
Commonwealth, chose to bind up its cause with that of the wanderers who
were playing in the garrets of Paris and Cologne at being princes and
chancellors. Under the administration of Cromwell, England was more
respected and dreaded than any power in Christendom and, even under
the ephemeral governments which followed his death, no foreign state
ventured to treat her with contempt. Thus Charles came back not as a
mediator between his people and a victorious enemy, but as a mediator
between internal factions. He found the Scotch Covenanters and the Irish
Papists alike subdued. He found Dunkirk and Jamaica added to the empire.
He was heir to the conquest and to the influence of the able usurper who
had excluded him.

The old government of England, as it had been far milder than the
old government of France, had been far less violently and completely
subverted. The national institutions had been spared, or imperfectly
eradicated. The laws had undergone little alteration. The tenures of the
soil were still to be learned from Littleton and Coke. The Great
Charter was mentioned with as much reverence in the parliaments of
the Commonwealth as in those of any earlier or of any later age. A
new Confession of Faith and a new ritual had been introduced into the
church. But the bulk of the ecclesiastical property still remained. The
colleges still held their estates. The parson still received his
tithes. The Lords had, at a crisis of great excitement, been excluded by
military violence from their House; but they retained their titles
and an ample share of the public veneration. When a nobleman made his
appearance in the House of Commons he was received with ceremonious
respect. Those few Peers who consented to assist at the inauguration
of the Protector were placed next to himself, and the most honourable
offices of the day were assigned to them. We learn from the debates of
Richard’s Parliament how strong a hold the old aristocracy had on the
affections of the people. One member of the House of Commons went so
far as to say that, unless their Lordships were peaceably restored, the
country might soon be convulsed by a war of the Barons. There was indeed
no great party hostile to the Upper House. There was nothing exclusive
in the constitution of that body. It was regularly recruited from among
the most distinguished of the country gentlemen, the lawyers, and the
clergy. The most powerful nobles of the century which preceded the civil
war, the Duke of Somerset, the Duke of Northumberland, Lord Seymour of
Sudeley, the Earl of Leicester, Lord Burleigh, the Earl of Salisbury,
the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Strafford, had all been commoners,
and had all raised themselves, by courtly arts or by parliamentary
talents, not merely to seats in the House of Lords, but to the first
influence in that assembly. Nor had the general conduct of the Peers
been such as to make them unpopular. They had not, indeed, in opposing
arbitrary measures, shown so much eagerness and pertinacity as the
Commons. But still they had opposed those measures. They had, at the
beginning of the discontents, a common interest with the people. If
Charles had succeeded in his scheme of governing without parliaments,
the consequence of the Peers would have been grievously diminished. If
he had been able to raise taxes by his own authority, the estates of the
Peers would have been as much at his mercy as those of the merchants or
the farmers. If he had obtained the power of imprisoning his subjects
at his pleasure, a Peer ran far greater risk of incurring the royal
displeasure, and of being accommodated with apartments in the Tower,
than any city trader or country squire. Accordingly Charles found that
the Great Council of Peers which he convoked at York would do nothing
for him. In the most useful reforms which were made during the first
session of the Long Parliament, the Peers concurred heartily with the
Lower House; and a large minority of the English nobles stood by the
popular side through the first years of the war. At Edgehill, Newbury,
Marston, and Naseby, the armies of the Parliament were commanded
by members of the aristocracy. It was not forgotten that a Peer
had imitated the example of Hampden in refusing the payment of the
ship-money, or that a Peer had been among the six members of the
legislature whom Charles illegally impeached.

Thus the old constitution of England was without difficulty
re-established; and of all the parts of the old constitution the
monarchical part was, at the time, dearest to the body of the people.
It had been injudiciously depressed, and it was in consequence unduly
exalted. From the day when Charles the First became a prisoner had
commenced a reaction in favour of his person and of his office. From the
day when the axe fell on his neck before the windows of his palace, that
reaction became rapid and violent. At the Restoration it had attained
such a point that it could go no further. The people were ready to place
at the mercy of their Sovereign all their most ancient and precious
rights. The most servile doctrines were publicly avowed. The most
moderate and constitutional opposition was condemned. Resistance was
spoken of with more horror than any crime which a human being can
commit. The Commons were more eager than the King himself to avenge the
wrongs of the royal house; more desirous than the bishops themselves to
restore the church; more ready to give money than the ministers to ask
for it.

They abrogated the excellent law passed in the first session of the Long
Parliament, with the general consent of all honest men, to insure the