frequent meeting of the great council of the nation. They might probably
have been induced to go further, and to restore the High Commission and
the Star-Chamber. All the contemporary accounts represent the nation
as in a state of hysterical excitement, of drunken joy. In the immense
multitude which crowded the beach at Dover, and bordered the road
along which the King travelled to London, there was not one who was not
weeping. Bonfires blazed. Bells jingled. The streets were thronged at
night by boon-companions, who forced all the passers-by to swallow on
bended knees brimming glasses to the health of his Most Sacred Majesty,
and the damnation of Red-nosed Noll. That tenderness to the fallen which
has, through many generations been a marked feature of the national
character, was for a time hardly discernible. All London crowded to
shout and laugh round the gibbet where hung the rotten remains of a
prince who had made England the dread of the world, who had been the
chief founder of her maritime greatness, and of her colonial empire, who
had conquered Scotland and Ireland, who had humbled Holland and Spain,
the terror of whose name had been as a guard round every English
traveller in remote countries, and round every Protestant congregation
in the heart of Catholic empires. When some of those brave and honest
though misguided men who had sate in judgment on their King were dragged
on hurdles to a death of prolonged torture, their last prayers were
interrupted by the hisses and execrations of thousands.

Such was England in 1660. In 1678 the whole face of things had changed.
At the former of those epochs eighteen years of commotion had made the
majority of the people ready to buy repose at any price. At the latter
epoch eighteen years of misgovernment had made the same majority
desirous to obtain security for their liberties at any risk. The fury
of their returning loyalty had spent itself in its first outbreak. In
a very few months they had hanged and half-hanged, quartered and
embowelled enough to satisfy them. The Roundhead party seemed to be not
merely overcome, but too much broken and scattered ever to rally again.
Then commenced the reflux of public opinion. The nation began to find
out to what a man it had intrusted, without conditions, all its dearest
interests, on what a man it had lavished all its fondest affection. On
the ignoble nature of the restored exile, adversity had exhausted all
her discipline in vain. He had one immense advantage over most other
princes. Though born in the purple, he was no better acquainted with the
vicissitudes of life and the diversities of character than most of his
subjects. He had known restraint, danger, penury, and dependence. He
had often suffered from ingratitude, insolence, and treachery. He had
received many signal proofs of faithful and heroic attachment. He had
seen, if ever man saw, both sides of human nature. But only one side
remained in his memory. He had learned only to despise and to distrust
his species, to consider integrity in men, and modesty in women, as mere
acting; nor did he think it worth while to keep his opinion to himself.
He was incapable of friendship; yet he was perpetually led by favourites
without being in the smallest degree duped by them. He knew that their
regard to his interests was all simulated; but, from a certain easiness
which had no connection with humanity, he submitted, half-laughing at
himself, to be made the tool of any woman whose person attracted him, or
of any man whose tattle diverted him. He thought little and cared less
about religion. He seems to have passed his life in dawdling suspense
between Hobbism and Popery. He was crowned in his youth with the
Covenant in his hand; he died at last with the Host sticking in his
throat; and during most of the intermediate years, was occupied in
persecuting both Covenanters and Catholics. He was not a tyrant from
the ordinary motives. He valued power for its own sake little, and fame
still less. He does not appear to have been vindictive, or to have found
any pleasing excitement in cruelty. What he wanted was to be amused, to
get through the twenty-four hours pleasantly without sitting down to dry
business. Sauntering was, as Sheffield expresses it, the true Sultana
Queen of his Majesty’s affections. A sitting in council would have been
insupportable to him if the Duke of Buckingham had not been there to
make mouths at the Chancellor. It has been said, and is highly probable,
that in his exile he was quite disposed to sell his rights to Cromwell
for a good round sum. To the last his only quarrel with his Parliaments
was that they often gave him trouble and would not always give him
money. If there was a person for whom he felt a real regard, that person
was his brother. If there was a point about which he really entertained
a scruple of conscience or of honour, that point was the descent of
the crown. Yet he was willing to consent to the Exclusion Bill for six
hundred thousand pounds; and the negotiation was broken off only because
he insisted on being paid beforehand. To do him justice, his temper was
good; his manners agreeable; his natural talents above mediocrity. But
he was sensual, frivolous, false, and cold-hearted, beyond almost any
prince of whom history makes mention.

Under the government of such a man, the English people could not be long
in recovering from the intoxication of loyalty. They were then, as
they are still, a brave, proud, and high-spirited race, unaccustomed to
defeat, to shame, or to servitude. The splendid administration of Oliver
had taught them to consider their country as a match for the greatest
empire of the earth, as the first of maritime powers, as the head of
the Protestant interest. Though, in the day of their affectionate
enthusiasm, they might sometimes extol the royal prerogative in terms
which would have better become the courtiers of Aurungzebe, they were
not men whom it was quite safe to take at their word. They were much
more perfect in the theory than in the practice of passive obedience.
Though they might deride the austere manners and scriptural phrases of
the Puritans they were still at heart a religious people. The majority
saw no great sin in field-sports, stage-plays, promiscuous dancing,
cards, fairs, starch, or false hair. But gross profaneness and
licentiousness were regarded with general horror; and the Catholic
religion was held in utter detestation by nine-tenths of the middle
class.

Such was the nation which, awaking from its rapturous trance, found
itself sold to a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court, defeated on its
own seas and rivers by a state of far inferior resources and placed
under the rule of pandars and buffoons. Our ancestors saw the best and
ablest divines of the age turned out of their benefices by hundreds.
They saw the prisons filled with men guilty of no other crime than
that of worshipping God according to the fashion generally prevailing
throughout Protestant Europe. They saw a Popish Queen on the throne,
and a Popish heir on the steps of the throne. They saw unjust aggression
followed by feeble war, and feeble war ending in disgraceful peace. They
saw a Dutch fleet riding triumphant in the Thames. They saw the Triple
Alliance broken, the Exchequer shut up, the public credit shaken, the
arms of England employed, in shameful subordination to France, against
a country which seemed to be the last asylum of civil and religious
liberty. They saw Ireland discontented, and Scotland in rebellion. They
saw, meantime, Whitehall swarming with sharpers and courtesans.

They saw harlot after harlot, and bastard after bastard, not only raised
to the highest honours of the peerage, but supplied out of the spoils of
the honest, industrious, and ruined public creditor, with ample means of
supporting the new dignity. The government became more odious every day.
Even in the bosom of that very House of Commons which had been elected
by the nation in the ecstasy of its penitence, of its joy, and of its
hope, an opposition sprang up and became powerful. Loyalty which
had been proof against all the disasters of the civil war, which had
survived the routs of Naseby and Worcester, which had never flinched
from sequestration and exile, which the Protector could never intimidate
or seduce, began to fail in this last and hardest trial. The storm had
long been gathering. At length it burst with a fury which threatened the
whole frame of society with dissolution.

When the general election of January 1679 took place, the nation had
retraced the path which it had been describing from 1640 to 1660. It was
again in the same mood in which it had been when, after twelve years
of misgovernment, the Long Parliament assembled. In every part of the
country, the name of courtier had become a by-word of reproach. The old
warriors of the Covenant again ventured out of those retreats in which
they had, at the time of the Restoration, hidden themselves from the
insults of the triumphant Malignants, and in which, during twenty years,
they had preserved in full vigour

               “The unconquerable will

               And study of revenge, immortal hate,

               With courage never to submit or yield,

                   And what is else not to be overcome.”

Then were again seen in the streets faces which called up strange
and terrible recollections of the days when the saints, with the high
praises of God in their mouths, and a two-edged sword in their hands,
had bound kings with chains, and nobles with links of iron. Then were
again heard voices which had shouted “Privilege” by the coach of Charles
the First in the time of his tyranny, and had called for “justice” in
Westminister Hall on the day of his trial. It has been the fashion to
represent the excitement of this period as the effect of the Popish
plot. To us it seems clear that the Popish plot was rather the effect
than the cause of the general agitation. It was not the disease, but a
symptom, though, like many other symptoms, it aggravated the severity of
the disease. In 1660 or 1661 it would have been utterly out of the power
of such men as Oates or Bedloe to give any serious disturbance to the
Government. They would have been laughed at, pilloried, well pelted,
soundly whipped, and speedily forgotten. In 1678 or 1679 there would
have been an outbreak if those men had never been born. For years things
had been steadily tending to such a consummation. Society was one vast
mass of combustible matter. No mass so vast and so combustible ever
waited long for a spark.

Rational men, we suppose, are now fully agreed that by far the greater
part, if not the whole, of Oates’s story was a pure fabrication. It is
indeed highly probable that, during his intercourse with the Jesuits,
he may have heard much wild talk about the best means of re-establishing
the Catholic religion in England, and that from some of the absurd
daydreams of the zealots with whom he then associated he may have taken
hints for his narrative. But we do not believe that he was privy to
anything which deserved the name of conspiracy. And it is quite certain
that, if there be any small portion of the truth in his evidence, that
portion is so deeply buried in falsehood that no human skill can now
effect a separation. We must not, however, forget, that we see his story
by the light of much information which his contemporaries did not at
first possess. We have nothing to say for the witnesses, but something
in mitigation to offer on behalf of the public. We own that the
credulity which the nation showed on that occasion seems to us, though
censurable indeed, yet not wholly inexcusable.

Our ancestors knew, from the experience of several generations at home
and abroad, how restless and encroaching was the disposition of the
Church of Rome. The heir-apparent of the crown was a bigoted member of
that church. The reigning King seemed far more inclined to show favour
to that church than to the Presbyterians. He was the intimate ally,
or rather the hired servant, of a powerful King, who had already given
proofs of his determination to tolerate within his dominions no other
religion than that of Rome. The Catholics had begun to talk a bolder
language than formerly, and to anticipate the restoration of their
worship in all its ancient dignity and splendour. At this juncture,
it is rumoured that a Popish Plot has been discovered. A distinguished
Catholic is arrested on suspicion. It appears that he has destroyed
almost all his papers. A few letters, however, have escaped the flames;
and these letters are found to contain much alarming matter, strange
expressions about subsidies from France, allusions to a vast scheme
which would “give the greatest blow to the Protestant religion that it
had ever received,” and which “would utterly subdue a pestilent heresy.”
It was natural that those who saw these expressions, in letters which
had been overlooked, should suspect that there was some horrible
villainy in those which had been carefully destroyed. Such was the
feeling of the House of Commons: “Question, question, Coleman’s
letters!” was the cry which drowned the voices of the minority.

Just after the discovery of these papers, a magistrate who had
been distinguished by his independent spirit, and who had taken the
deposition of the informer, is found murdered, under circumstances which
make it almost incredible that he should have fallen either by robbers
or by his own hands. Many of our readers can remember the state of
London just after the murders of Marr and Williams, the terror which
was on every face, the careful barring of doors, the providing of
blunderbusses and watchmen’s rattles. We know of a shopkeeper who on
that occasion sold three hundred rattles in about ten hours. Those who
remember that panic may be able to form some notion of the state of
England after the death of Godfrey. Indeed, we must say that, after
having read and weighed all the evidence now extant on that mysterious
subject, we incline to the opinion that he was assassinated, and
assassinated by Catholics, not assuredly by Catholics of the least
weight or note, but by some of those crazy and vindictive fanatics who
may be found in every large sect, and who are peculiarly likely to
be found in a persecuted sect. Some of the violent Cameronians had
recently, under similar exasperation, committed similar crimes.

It was natural that there should be a panic; and it was natural that
the people should, in a panic, be unreasonable and credulous. It must
be remembered also that they had not at first, as we have, the means of
comparing the evidence which was given on different trials. They were
not aware of one tenth part of the contradictions and absurdities which
Oates had committed. The blunders, for example, into which he fell
before the Council, his mistake about the person of Don John of Austria,
and about the situation of the Jesuits’ College at Paris, were not
publicly known. He was a bad man; but the spies and deserters by whom
governments are informed of conspiracies axe generally bad men. His
story was strange and romantic; but it was not more strange and romantic
than a well-authenticated Popish plot, which some few people then living
might remember, the Gunpowder treason. Oates’s account of the burning of
London was in itself not more improbable than the project of blowing up
King, Lords, and Commons, a project which had not only been entertained
by very distinguished Catholics, but which had very narrowly missed of
success. As to the design on the King’s person, all the world knew that,
within a century, two kings of France and a prince of Orange had been
murdered by Catholics, purely from religious enthusiasm, that Elizabeth
had been in constant danger of a similar fate, and that such attempts,
to say the least, had not been discouraged by the highest authority of
the Church of Rome. The characters of some of the accused persons stood
high; but so did that of Anthony Babington, and that of Everard Digby.
Those who suffered denied their guilt to the last; but no persons
versed in criminal proceedings would attach any importance to this
circumstance. It was well known also that the most distinguished
Catholic casuists had written largely in defence of regicide, of mental
reservation, and of equivocation. It was not quite impossible that men
whose minds had been nourished with the writings of such casuists might
think themselves justified in denying a charge which, if acknowledged,
would bring great scandal on the Church. The trials of the accused
Catholics were exactly like all the state trials of those days; that is
to say, as infamous as they could be. They were neither fairer nor less
fair than those of Algernon Sydney, of Rosewell, of Cornish, of all the
unhappy men, in short, whom a predominant party brought to what was
then facetiously called justice. Till the Revolution purified our
institutions and our manners, a state trial was merely a murder preceded
by the uttering of certain gibberish and the performance of certain
mummeries.

The Opposition had now the great body of the nation with them. Thrice
the King dissolved the Parliament; and thrice the constituent body sent
him back representatives fully determined to keep strict watch on
all his measures, and to exclude his brother from the throne. Had
the character of Charles resembled that of his father, this intestine
discord would infallibly have ended in a civil war. Obstinacy and
passion would have been his ruin. His levity and apathy were his
security. He resembled one of those light Indian boats which are safe
because they are pliant, which yield to the impact of every wave, and
which therefore bound without danger through a surf in which a vessel
ribbed with heart of oak would inevitably perish. The only thing about
which his mind was unalterably made up was that, to use his own phrase,
he would not go on his travels again for anybody or for anything. His
easy, indolent behaviour produced all the effects of the most artful
policy. He suffered things to take their course; and if Achitophel had
been at one of his ears, and Machiavel at the other, they could have
given him no better advice than to let things take their course. He gave
way to the violence of the movement, and waited for the corresponding
violence of the rebound. He exhibited himself to his subjects in the
interesting character of an oppressed king, who was ready to do
anything to please them, and who asked of them, in return, only some
consideration for his conscientious scruples and for his feelings of
natural affection, who was ready to accept any ministers, to grant any
guarantees to public liberty, but who could not find it in his heart to
take away his brother’s birthright. Nothing more was necessary. He had
to deal with a people whose noble weakness it has always been not to
press too hardly on the vanquished, with a people the lowest and most
brutal of whom cry “Shame!” if they see a man struck when he is on the
ground. The resentment which the nation bad felt towards the Court
began to abate as soon as the Court was manifestly unable to offer
any resistance. The panic which Godfrey’s death had excited gradually
subsided. Every day brought to light some new falsehood or contradiction
in the stories of Oates and Bedloe. The people were glutted with the
blood of Papists, as they had, twenty years before, been glutted with
the blood of regicides. When the first sufferers in the plot were
brought to the bar, the witnesses for the defence were in danger of
being torn in pieces by the mob. Judges, jurors, and spectators seemed
equally indifferent to justice, and equally eager for revenge. Lord
Stafford, the last sufferer, was pronounced not guilty by a large
minority of his peers; and when he protested his innocence on the
scaffold, the people cried out, “God bless you, my lord; we believe you,
my lord.” The attempt to make a son of Lucy Waters King of England was
alike offensive to the pride of the nobles and to the moral feeling
of the middle class. The old Cavalier party, the great majority of the
landed gentry, the clergy and the universities almost to a man, began to
draw together, and to form in close array round the throne.

A similar reaction had begun to take place in favour of Charles the
First during the second session of the Long Parliament; and, if that
prince had been honest or sagacious enough to keep himself strictly
within the limits of the law, we have not the smallest doubt that he
would in a few months have found himself at least as powerful as his
best friends, Lord Falkland, Culpeper, or Hyde, would have wished to
see him. By illegally impeaching the leaders of the Opposition, and by
making in person a wicked attempt on the House of Commons, he stopped
and turned back that tide of loyal feeling which was just beginning to
run strongly. The son, quite as little restrained by law or by honour
as the father, was, luckily for himself, a man of a lounging, careless
temper, and, from temper, we believe, rather than from policy, escaped
that great error which cost the father so dear. Instead of trying to
pluck the fruit before it was ripe, he lay still till it fell mellow
into his very mouth. If he had arrested Lord Shaftesbury and Lord
Russell in a manner not warranted by law, it is not improbable that he
would have ended his life in exile. He took the sure course. He employed
only his legal prerogatives, and he found them amply sufficient for his
purpose.

During the first eighteen or nineteen years of his reign, he had been
playing the game of his enemies. From 1678 to 1681 his enemies had
played his game. They owed their power to his misgovernment. He owed the
recovery of his power to their violence. The great body of the people
came back to him after their estrangement with impetuous affection. He
had scarcely been more popular when he landed on the coast of Kent than
when, after several years of restraint and humiliation, he dissolved his
last Parliament.

Nevertheless, while this flux and reflux of opinion went on, the cause
of public liberty was steadily gaining. There had been a great reaction
in favour of the throne at the Restoration. But the Star-Chamber, the
High Commission, the Ship-money, had for ever disappeared. There was
now another similar reaction. But the Habeas Corpus Act had been
passed during the short predominance of the Opposition, and it was not
repealed.

The King, however, supported as he was by the nation, was quite strong
enough to inflict a terrible revenge on the party which had lately held
him in bondage. In 1681 commenced the third of those periods in which
we have divided the history of England from the Restoration to the
Revolution. During this period a third great reaction took place. The
excesses of tyranny restored to the cause of liberty the hearts which
had been alienated from that cause by the excesses of faction. In 1681,
the King had almost all his enemies at his feet. In 1688, the King was
an exile in a strange land.

The whole of that machinery which had lately been in motion against the
Papists was now put in motion against the Whigs, browbeating judges,
packed juries, lying witnesses, clamorous spectators. The ablest chief
of the party fled to a foreign country and died there. The most virtuous
man of the party was beheaded. Another of its most distinguished members
preferred a voluntary death to the shame of a public execution. The
boroughs on which the Government could not depend were, by means of
legal quibbles, deprived of their charters; and their constitution
was remodelled in such a manner as almost to ensure the return
of representatives devoted to the Court. All parts of the kingdom
sedulously sent up the most extravagant assurances of the love which
they bore to their sovereign, and of the abhorrence with which they
regarded those who questioned the divine origin or the boundless
extent of his power. It is scarcely necessary to say that, in this
hot competition of bigots and staves, the University of Oxford had the
unquestioned pre-eminence. The glory of being further behind the age
than any other portion of the British people, is one which that learned
body acquired early, and has never lost.

Charles died, and his brother came to the throne; but, though the person
of the sovereign was changed, the love and awe with which the office was
regarded were undiminished. Indeed, it seems that, of the two princes,
James was, in spite of his religion, rather the favourite of the High
Church party. He had been specially singled out as the mark of the
Whigs; and this circumstance sufficed to make him the idol of the
Tories. He called a parliament. The loyal gentry of the counties and the
packed voters of the remodelled boroughs gave him a parliament such as
England had not seen for a century, a parliament beyond all comparison
the most obsequious that ever sate under a prince of the House of
Stuart. One insurrectionary movement, indeed, took place in England,
and another in Scotland. Both were put down with ease, and punished with
tremendous severity. Even after that bloody circuit, which will never
be forgotten while the English race exists in any part of the globe,
no member of the House of Commons ventured to whisper even the mildest
censure on Jeffreys. Edmund Waller, emboldened by his great age and his
high reputation, attacked the cruelty of the military chiefs; and this
is the brightest part of his long and checkered public life. But even
Waller did not venture to arraign the still more odious cruelty of the
Chief Justice. It is hardly too much to say that James, at that time,
had little reason to envy the extent of authority possessed by Lewis the
Fourteenth.

By what means this vast power was in three years broken down, by what
perverse and frantic misgovernment the tyrant revived the spirit of
the vanquished Whigs, turned to fixed hostility the neutrality of the
trimmers, and drove from him the landed gentry, the Church, the army,
his own creatures, his own children, is well known to our readers. But
we wish to say something about one part of the question, which in our
own time has a little puzzled some very worthy men, and about which the
author of the “Continuation” before us has said much with which we can
by no means concur.

James, it is said, declared himself a supporter of toleration. If
he violated the constitution, he at least violated it for one of the
noblest ends that any statesman ever had in view. His object was to free
millions of his subjects from penal laws and disabilities which hardly
any person now considers as just. He ought, therefore, to be regarded as
blameless, or, at worst, as guilty only of employing irregular means
to effect a most praiseworthy purpose. A very ingenious man, whom we
believe to be a Catholic, Mr. Banim, has written a historical novel, of
the literary merit of which we cannot speak very highly, for the purpose
of inculcating this opinion. The editor of Mackintosh’s Fragments
assures us, that the standard of James bore the nobler inscription, and
so forth; the meaning of which is, that William and the other authors of
the Revolution were vile Whigs who drove out James from being a Radical;
that the crime of the King was his going further in liberality than his
subjects: that he was the real champion of freedom; and that Somers,
Locke, Newton, and other narrow-minded people of the same sort, were the
real bigots and oppressors.

Now, we admit that if the premises can be made out, the conclusion
follows. If it can be shown that James did sincerely wish to establish
perfect freedom of conscience, we shall think his conduct deserving
of indulgence, if not of praise. We shall not be inclined to censure
harshly even his illegal acts. We conceive that so noble and salutary an
object would have justified resistance on the part of subjects. We can
therefore scarcely deny that it would at least excuse encroachment on
the part of a king. But it can be proved, we think, by the strongest
evidence, that James had no such object in view, and that, under the
pretence of establishing perfect religious liberty, he was trying to
establish the ascendency and the exclusive dominion of the Church of
Rome.

It is true that he professed himself a supporter of toleration. Every
sect clamours for toleration when it is down. We have not the smallest
doubt that, when Bonner was in the Marshalsea, he thought it a very hard
thing that a man should be locked up in a gaol for not being able to
understand the words, “This is my body,” in the same way with the lords
of the council. It would not be very wise to conclude that a beggar is
full of Christian charity, because he assures you that God will reward
you if you give him a penny; or that a soldier is humane because he
cries out lustily for quarter when a bayonet is at his throat. The
doctrine which from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has
been held by all bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words,
and stripped of rhetorical disguise is simply this: I am in the right,
and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger you ought to
tolerate me; for it is your duty to tolerate truth. But when I am the
stronger, I shall persecute you; for it is my duty to persecute error.

The Catholics lay under severe restraints in England. James wished to
remove those restraints; and therefore he held a language favourable
to liberty of conscience. But the whole history of his life proves
that this was a mere pretence. In 1679 he held similar language, in a
conversation with the magistrates of Amsterdam; and the author of the
“Continuation” refers to the circumstance as a proof that the King had
long entertained a strong feeling on the subject. Unhappily it proves
only the utter insincerity of all the King’s later professions. If he
had pretended to be converted to the doctrines of toleration after his
accession to the throne, some credit might have been due to him. But we
know most certainly that, in 1679, and long after that year, James was a
most bloody and remorseless persecutor. After 1679, he was placed at
the head of the government of Scotland. And what had been his conduct
in that country? He had hunted down the scattered remnant of the
Covenanters with a barbarity of which no other prince of modern times,
Philip the Second excepted, had ever shown himself capable. He had
indulged himself in the amusement of seeing the torture of the Boot
inflicted on the wretched enthusiasts whom persecution had driven to
resistance. After his accession, almost his first act was to obtain
from the servile parliament of Scotland a law for inflicting death on
preachers at conventicles held within houses, and on both preachers and
hearers at conventicles held in the open air. All this he had done, for
a religion which was not his own. All this he had done, not in defence
of truth against error, but in defence of one damnable error against
another, in defence of the Episcopalian against the Presbyterian
apostasy. Lewis the Fourteenth is justly censured for trying to dragoon
his subjects to heaven. But it was reserved for James to torture and
murder for the difference between two roads to hell. And this man,
so deeply imbued with the poison of intolerance that, rather than not
persecute at all, he would persecute people out of one heresy into
another, this man is held up as the champion of religious liberty. This
man, who persecuted in the cause of the unclean panther, would not, we
are told, have persecuted for the sake of the milk-white and immortal
hind.

And what was the conduct of James at the very time when he was
professing zeal for the rights of conscience? Was he not even then
persecuting to the very best of his power? Was he not employing all his
legal prerogatives, and many prerogatives which were not legal, for
the purpose of forcing his subjects to conform to his creed? While he
pretended to abhor the laws which excluded Dissenters from office, was
he not himself dismissing from office his ablest, his most experienced,
his most faithful servants, on account of their religious opinions? For
what offence was Lord Rochester driven from the Treasury? He was closely
connected with the Royal House. He was at the head of the Tory party. He
had stood firmly by James in the most trying emergencies. But he would
not change his religion, and he was dismissed. That we may not be
suspected of overstating the case, Dr. Lingard, a very competent, and
assuredly not a very willing witness, shall speak for us. “The King,”
says that able but partial writer, “was disappointed. He complained
to Barillon of the obstinacy and insincerity of the treasurer; and the
latter received from the French envoy a very intelligible hint that the
loss of office would result from his adhesion to his religious creed. He
was, however, inflexible; and James, after a long delay, communicated
to him, but with considerable embarrassment and many tears, his final
determination. He had hoped, he said, that Rochester, by conforming to
the Church of Rome, would have spared him the unpleasant task; but kings
must sacrifice their feelings to their duty.” And this was the King who
wished to have all men of all sects rendered alike capable of holding
office. These proceedings were alone sufficient to take away all credit
from his liberal professions; and such, as we learn from the despatches
of the Papal Nuncio, was really the effect. “Pare,” says D’Adda, writing
a few days after the retirement of Rochester, “pare che gli animi sono
inaspriti della voce che corre tra il popolo, d’esser cacciato il detto
ministro per non essere Cattolico, percio tirarsi al esterminio de’
Protestanti” Was it ever denied that the favours of the Crown were
constantly bestowed and withheld purely on account of the religious
opinions of the claimants? And if these things were done in the green
tree, what would have been done in the dry? If James acted thus when he
had the strongest motives to court his Protestant subjects, what course
was he likely to follow when he had obtained from them all that he
asked?

Who again was his closest ally? And what was the policy of that ally?
The subjects of James, it is true, did not know half the infamy of their
sovereign. They did not know, as we know, that, while he was
lecturing them on the blessings of equal toleration, he was constantly
congratulating his good brother Lewis on the success of that intolerant
policy which had turned the fairest tracts of France into deserts,
and driven into exile myriads of the most peaceable, industrious, and
skilful artisans in the world. But the English did know that the
two princes were bound together in the closest union. They saw their
sovereign with toleration on his lips, separating himself from those
states which had first set the example of toleration, and connecting
himself by the strongest ties with the most faithless and merciless
persecutor who could then be found on any continental throne.

By what advice again was James guided? Who were the persons in whom he
placed the greatest confidence, and who took the warmest interest in his
schemes? The ambassador of France, the Nuncio of Rome, and Father Petre
the Jesuit. And is not this enough to prove that the establishment of
equal toleration was not his plan? Was Lewis for toleration? Was the
Vatican for toleration? Was the order of Jesuits for toleration? We know
that the liberal professions of James were highly approved by those
very governments, by those very societies, whose theory and practice it
notoriously was to keep no faith with heretics and to give no quarter to
heretics. And are we, in order to save James’s reputation for sincerity,
to believe that all at once those governments and those societies had
changed their nature, had discovered the criminality of all their former
conduct, had adopted principles far more liberal than those of Locke, of
Leighton, or of Tillotson? Which is the more probable supposition,
that the King who had revoked the edict of Nantes, the Pope under whose
sanction the Inquisition was then imprisoning and burning, the religious
order which, in every controversy in which it had ever been engaged, had
called in the aid either of the magistrate or of the assassin, should
have become as thorough-going friends to religious liberty as Dr.
Franklin and Mr. Jefferson, or that a Jesuit-ridden bigot should be
induced to dissemble for the good of the Church?

The game which the Jesuits were playing was no new game. A hundred years
before they had preached up political freedom, just as they were now
preaching up religious freedom. They had tried to raise the republicans
against Henry the Fourth and Elizabeth, just as they were now trying to
raise the Protestant Dissenters against the Established Church. In
the sixteenth century, the tools of Philip the Second were constantly
preaching doctrines that bordered on Jacobinism, constantly insisting on
the right of the people to cashier kings, and of every private
citizen to plunge his dagger into the heart of a wicked ruler. In the
seventeenth century, the persecutors of the Huguenots were crying
out against the tyranny of the Established Church of England, and
vindicating with the utmost fervour the right of every man to adore God
after his own fashion. In both cases they were alike insincere. In both
cases the fool who had trusted them would have found himself miserably
duped. A good and wise man would doubtless disapprove of the arbitrary
measures of Elizabeth. But would he have really served the interests of
political liberty, if he had put faith in the professions of the Romish
Casuists, joined their party, and taken a share in Northumberland’s
revolt, or in Babington’s conspiracy? Would he not have been assisting
to establish a far worse tyranny than that which he was trying to put
down? In the same manner, a good and wise man would doubtless see
very much to condemn in the conduct of the Church of England under the
Stuarts. But was he therefore to join the King and the Catholics against
that Church? And was it not plain that, by so doing, he would assist in
setting up a spiritual despotism, compared with which the despotism of
the Establishment was as a little finger to the loins, as a rod of whips
to a rod of scorpions?

Lewis had a far stronger mind than James. He had at least an equally
high sense of honour. He was in a much less degree the slave of his
priests. His Protestant subjects had all the security for their rights
of conscience which law and solemn compact could give. Had that security
been found sufficient? And was not one such instance enough for one
generation?

The plan of James seems to us perfectly intelligible. The toleration
which, with the concurrence and applause of all the most cruel
persecutors in Europe, he was offering to his people, was meant simply
to divide them. This is the most obvious and vulgar of political
artifices. We have seen it employed a hundred times within our own
memory. At this moment we see the Carlists in France hallooing on the
Extreme Left against the Centre Left. Four years ago the same trick was
practised in England. We heard old buyers and sellers of boroughs, men
who had been seated in the House of Commons by the unsparing use of
ejectments, and who had, through their whole lives, opposed every
measure which tended to increase the power of the democracy, abusing
the Reform Bill as not democratic enough, appealing to the labouring
classes, execrating the tyranny of the ten-pound householders, and
exchanging compliments and caresses with the most noted incendiaries of
our time. The cry of universal toleration was employed by James, just
as the cry of universal suffrage was lately employed by some veteran
Tories. The object of the mock democrats of our time was to produce
a conflict between the middle classes and the multitude, and thus
to prevent all reform. The object of James was to produce a conflict
between the Church and the Protestant Dissenters, and thus to facilitate
the victory of the Catholics over both.

We do not believe that he could have succeeded. But we do not think his
plan so utterly frantic and hopeless as it has generally been thought;
and we are sure that, if he had been allowed to gain his first point,
the people would have had no remedy left but an appeal to physical
force, which would have been made under most unfavourable circumstances.
He conceived that the Tories, hampered by their professions of
passive obedience, would have submitted to his pleasure, and that the
Dissenters, seduced by his delusive promises of relief, would have given
him strenuous support. In this way he hoped to obtain a law, nominally
for the removal of all religious disabilities, but really for the
excluding of all Protestants from all offices. It is never to be
forgotten that a prince who has all the patronage of the State in his
hands can, without violating the letter of the law, establish whatever
test he chooses. And, from the whole conduct of James, we have not the
smallest doubt that he would have availed himself of his power to the
utmost. The statute-book might declare all Englishmen equally capable
of holding office; but to what end, if all offices were in the gift of
a sovereign resolved not to employ a single heretic? We firmly believe
that not one post in the government, in the army, in the navy, on
the bench, or at the bar, not one peerage, nay not one ecclesiastical
benefice in the royal gift, would have been bestowed on any Protestant
of any persuasion. Even while the King had still strong motives to
dissemble, he had made a Catholic Dean of Christ Church and a Catholic
President of Magdalen College. There seems to be no doubt that the See
of York was kept vacant for another Catholic. If James had been suffered
to follow this course for twenty years, every military man from a
general to a drummer, every officer of a ship, every judge, every King’s
counsel, every lord-lieutenant of a county, every justice of the peace,
every ambassador, every minister of state, every person employed in the
royal household, in the custom-house, in the post-office, in the excise,
would have been a Catholic. The Catholics would have had a majority in
the House of Lords, even if that majority had been made, as Sunderland
threatened, by bestowing coronets on a whole troop of the Guards.
Catholics would have had, we believe, the chief weight even in the
Convocation. Every bishop, every dean, every holder of a crown living,
every head of every college which was subject to the royal power, would
have belonged to the Church of Rome. Almost all the places of liberal
education would have been under the direction of Catholics. The whole
power of licensing books would have been in the hands of Catholics. All
this immense mass of power would have been steadily supported by the
arms and by the gold of France, and would have descended to an heir
whose whole education would have been conducted with a view to one
single end, the complete re-establishment of the Catholic religion. The
House of Commons would have been the only legal obstacle. But the rights
of a great portion of the electors were at the mercy of the courts of
law; and the courts of law were absolutely dependent on the Crown. We
cannot therefore think it altogether impossible that a House might have
been packed which would have restored the days of Mary.

We certainly do not believe that this would have been tamely borne.
But we do believe that, if the nation had been deluded by the King’s
professions of toleration, all this would have been attempted, and could
have been averted only by a most bloody and destructive contest, in
which the whole Protestant population would have been opposed to the
Catholics. On the one side would have been a vast numerical superiority.
But on the other side would have been the whole organization of
government, and two great disciplined armies, that of James, and that
of Lewis. We do not doubt that the nation would have achieved its
deliverance. But we believe that the struggle would have shaken the
whole fabric of society, and that the vengeance of the conquerors would
have been terrible and unsparing.

But James was stopped at the outset. He thought himself secure of the
Tories, because they professed to consider all resistance as sinful, and
of the Protestant Dissenters, because he offered them relief. He was in
the wrong as to both. The error into which he fell about the Dissenters
was very natural. But the confidence which he placed in the loyal
assurances of the High Church party, was the most exquisitely ludicrous
proof of folly that a politician ever gave.

Only imagine a man acting for one single day on the supposition that
all his neighbours believe all that they profess, and act up to all that
they believe. Imagine a man acting on the supposition that he may safely
offer the deadliest injuries and insults to everybody who says that
revenge is sinful; or that he may safely intrust all his property
without security to any person who says that it is wrong to steal. Such
a character would be too absurd for the wildest farce. Yet the folly of
James did not stop short of this incredible extent. Because the clergy
had declared that resistance to oppression was in no case lawful,
he conceived that he might oppress them exactly as much as he chose,
without the smallest danger of resistance. He quite forgot that, when
they magnified the royal prerogative, the prerogative was exerted on
their side, that, when they preached endurance, they had nothing to
endure, that, when they declared it unlawful to resist evil, none but
Whigs and Dissenters suffered any evil. It had never occurred to
him that a man feels the calamities of his enemies with one sort of
sensibility, and his own with quite a different sort. It had never
occurred to him as possible that a reverend divine might think it the
duty of Baxter and Bunyan to bear insults and to lie in dungeons without
murmuring, and yet when he saw the smallest chance that his own prebend
might be transferred to some sly Father from Italy or Flanders, might
begin to discover much matter for useful meditation in the texts
touching Ehud’s knife and Jael’s hammer. His majesty was not aware, it
should seem, that people do sometimes reconsider their opinions; and
that nothing more disposes a man to reconsider his opinions, than a
suspicion, that, if he adheres to them, he is very likely to be a beggar
or a martyr. Yet it seems strange that these truths should have escaped
the royal mind. Those Churchmen who had signed the Oxford Declaration
in favour of passive obedience had also signed the thirty-nine Articles.
And yet the very man who confidently expected that, by a little coaxing
and bullying, he should induce them to renounce the Articles, was
thunderstruck when he found that they were disposed to soften down the
doctrines of the Declaration. Nor did it necessarily follow that,
even if the theory of the Tories had undergone no modification, their
practice would coincide with their theory. It might, one should think,
have crossed the mind of a man of fifty, who had seen a great deal of
the world, that people sometimes do what they think wrong. Though a
prelate might hold that Paul directs us to obey even a Nero, it might
not on that account be perfectly safe to treat the Right Reverend Father
in God after the fashion of Nero, in the hope that he would continue
to obey on the principles of Paul. The King indeed had only to look at
home. He was at least as much attached to the Catholic Church as any
Tory gentleman or clergyman could be to the Church of England. Adultery
was at least as clearly and strongly condemned by his Church as
resistance by the Church of England. Yet his priests could not keep him
from Arabella Sedley. While he was risking his crown for the sake of his
soul, he was risking his soul for the sake of an ugly, dirty mistress.
There is something delightfully grotesque in the spectacle of a man
who, while living in the habitual violation of his own known duties, is
unable to believe that any temptation can draw any other person aside
from the path of virtue.

James was disappointed in all his calculations. His hope was that the
Tories would follow their principles, and that the Nonconformists would
follow their interests. Exactly the reverse took place. The great
body of the Tories sacrificed the principle of non-resistance to their
interests; the great body of Nonconformists rejected the delusive offers
of the King, and stood firmly by their principles. The two parties whose
strife had convulsed the empire during half a century were united for
a moment; and all that vast royal power which three years before had
seemed immovably fixed vanished at once like chaff in a hurricane.

The very great length to which this article has already been extended
makes it impossible for us to discuss, as we had meant to do, the
characters and conduct of the leading English statesmen at this crisis.
But we must offer a few remarks on the spirit and tendency of the
Revolution of 1688.

The editor of this volume quotes the Declaration of Right, and tells us
that, by looking at it, we may “judge at a glance whether the authors of
the Revolution achieved all they might and ought, in their position, to
have achieved; whether the Commons of England did their duty to their
constituents, their country, posterity, and universal freedom.” We
are at a loss to imagine how he can have read and transcribed the
Declaration of Right, and yet have so utterly misconceived its nature.
That famous document is, as its very name imports, declaratory, and
not remedial. It was never meant to be a measure of reform. It
neither contained, nor was designed to contain, any allusion to those
innovations which the authors of the Revolution considered as desirable,
and which they speedily proceeded to make. The Declaration was merely a
recital of certain old and wholesome laws which had been violated by
the Stuarts, and a solemn protest against the validity of any precedent
which might be set up in opposition to those laws. The words run thus:
“They do claim, demand, and insist upon all and singular the premises
as their undoubted rights and liberties.” Before a man begins to make
improvements on his estate, he must know its boundaries. Before a
legislature sits down to reform a constitution, it is fit to ascertain
what that constitution really is. This is all that the Declaration
was intended to do; and to quarrel with it because it did not directly
introduce any beneficial changes is to quarrel with meat for not being
fuel.

The principle on which the authors of the Revolution acted cannot be
mistaken. They were perfectly aware that the English institutions stood
in need of reform. But they also knew that an important point was gained
if they could settle once for all, by a solemn compact, the matters
which had, during several generations, been in controversy between
Parliament and the Crown. They therefore most judiciously abstained from
mixing up the irritating and perplexing question of what ought to be the
law with the plain question of what was the law. As to the claims set
forth in the Declaration of Right, there was little room for debate,
Whigs and Tories were generally agreed as to the illegality of the
dispensing power and of taxation imposed by the royal prerogative.
The articles were therefore adjusted in a very few days. But if the
Parliament had determined to revise the whole constitution, and to
provide new securities against misgovernment, before proclaiming the new
sovereign, months would have been lost in disputes. The coalition which
had delivered the country would have been instantly dissolved. The Whigs
would have quarrelled with the Tories, the Lords with the Commons, the
Church with the Dissenters; and all this storm of conflicting interests
and conflicting theories would have been raging round a vacant throne.
In the meantime, the greatest power on the Continent was attacking our
allies, and meditating a descent on our own territories. Dundee was
preparing to raise the Highlands. The authority of James was still owned
by the Irish. If the authors of the Revolution had been fools enough to
take this course, we have little doubt that Luxembourg would have been
upon them in the midst of their constitution-making. They might probably
have been interrupted in a debate on Filmer’s and Sydney’s theories of
government by the entrance of the musqueteers of Lewis’s household, and
have been marched off, two and two, to frame imaginary monarchies
and commonwealths in the Tower. We have had in our own time abundant
experience of the effects of such folly. We have seen nation after
nation enslaved, because the friends of liberty wasted in discussions
upon abstract questions the time which ought to have been employed in
preparing for vigorous national defence. This editor, apparently, would
have had the English Revolution of 1688 end as the Revolutions of Spain
and Naples ended in our days. Thank God, our deliverers were men of a
very different order from the Spanish and Neapolitan legislators. They
might on many subjects hold opinions which, in the nineteenth century,
would not be considered as liberal. But they were not dreaming pedants.
They were statesmen accustomed to the management of great affairs.
Their plans of reform were not so extensive as those of the lawgivers
of Cadiz; but what they planned, that they effected; and what they
effected, that they maintained against the fiercest hostility at home
and abroad.

Their first object was to seat William on the throne; and they were
right. We say this without any reference to the eminent personal
qualities of William, or to the follies and crimes of James. If the two
princes had interchanged characters, our opinions would still have been
the same. It was even more necessary to England at that time that her
king should be a usurper than that he should be a hero. There could
be no security for good government without a change of dynasty. The
reverence for hereditary right and the doctrine of passive obedience had
taken such a hold on the minds of the Tories, that, if James had been
restored to power on any conditions, their attachment to him would in
all probability have revived, as the indignation which recent oppression
had produced faded from their minds. It had become indispensable to have
a sovereign whose title to his throne was strictly bound up with the
title of the nation to its liberties. In the compact between the Prince
of Orange and the Convention, there was one most important article
which, though not expressed, was perfectly understood by both parties,
and for the performance of which the country had securities far better
than all the engagements that Charles the First or Ferdinand the Seventh
ever took in the day of their weakness, and broke in the day of their
power. The article to which we allude was this, that William would in
all things conform himself to what should appear to be the fixed and
deliberate sense of his Parliament. The security for the performance
was this, that he had no claim to the throne except the choice of
Parliament, and no means of maintaining himself on the throne but the
support of Parliament. All the great and inestimable reforms which
speedily followed the Revolution were implied in those simple
words; “The Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, assembled at
Westminster, do resolve that William and Mary, Prince and Princess of
Orange, be, and be declared King and Queen of England.”

And what were the reforms of which we speak? We will shortly recount
some which we think the most important; and we will then leave our
readers to judge whether those who consider the Revolution as a mere
change of dynasty, beneficial to a few aristocrats, but useless to
the body of the people, or those who consider it as a happy era in the
history of the British nation and of the human species, have judged more
correctly of its nature.

Foremost in the list of the benefits which our country owes to the
Revolution we place the Toleration Act. It is true that this measure
fell short of the wishes of the leading Whigs. It is true also that,
where Catholics were concerned, even the most enlightened of the leading
Whigs held opinions by no means so liberal as those which are happily
common at the present day. Those distinguished statesmen did, however,
make a noble, and, in some respects, a successful struggle for the
rights of conscience. Their wish was to bring the great body of the
Protestant Dissenters within the pale of the Church by judicious
alterations in the Liturgy and the Articles, and to grant to those who
still remained without that pale the most ample toleration. They framed
a plan of comprehension which would have satisfied a great majority of
the seceders; and they proposed the complete abolition of that absurd
and odious test which, after having been, during a century and a half, a
scandal to the pious and a laughing-stock to the profane, was at length
removed in our time. The immense power of the Clergy and of the Tory
gentry frustrated these excellent designs. The Whigs, however, did
much. They succeeded in obtaining a law in the provisions of which
a philosopher will doubtless find much to condemn, but which had the
practical effect of enabling almost every Protestant Nonconformist to
follow the dictates of his own conscience without molestation. Scarcely
a law in the statute-book is theoretically more objectionable than the
Toleration Act. But we question whether in the whole of that vast mass
of legislation, from the Great Charter downwards, there be a single law
which has so much diminished the sum of human suffering, which has done
so much to allay bad passions, which has put an end to so much petty
tyranny and vexation, which has brought gladness, peace, and a sense of
security to so many private dwellings.

The second of those great reforms which the Revolution produced was the
final establishment of the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland. We shall not
now inquire whether the Episcopal or the Calvinistic form of church
government be more agreeable to primitive practice. Far be it from us to
disturb with our doubts the repose of any Oxonian Bachelor of Divinity
who conceives that the English prelates with their baronies and palaces,
their purple and their fine linen, their mitred carriages and their
sumptuous tables, are the true successors of those ancient bishops who
lived by catching fish and mending tents. We say only that the Scotch,
doubtless from their own inveterate stupidity and malice, were not
Episcopalians; that they could not be made Episcopalians; that the
whole power of government had been in vain employed for the purpose
of converting them; that the fullest instruction on the mysterious
questions of the Apostolical succession and the imposition of hands had
been imparted by the very logical process of putting the legs of the
students into wooden boots, and driving two or more wedges between their
knees; that a course of divinity lectures, of the most edifying kind,
had been given in the Grassmarket of Edinburgh; yet that, in spite of
all the exertions of those great theological professors, Lauderdale
and Dundee, the Covenanters were as obstinate as ever. To the contest
between the Scotch nation and the Anglican Church are to be ascribed
near thirty years of the most frightful misgovernment ever seen in any
part of Great Britain. If the Revolution had produced no other effect
than that of freeing the Scotch from the yoke of an establishment which
they detested, and giving them one to which they were attached, it would
have been one of the happiest events in our history.

The third great benefit which the country derived from the Revolution
was the alteration in the mode of granting the supplies. It had been the
practice to settle on every prince, at the commencement of his reign,
the produce of certain taxes which, it was supposed, would yield a
sum sufficient to defray the ordinary expenses of government. The
distribution of the revenue was left wholly to the sovereign. He might
be forced by a war, or by his own profusion, to ask for an extraordinary
grant. But, if his policy were economical and pacific, he might reign
many years without once being under the necessity of summoning his
Parliament, or of taking their advice when he had summoned them. This
was not all. The natural tendency of every society in which property
enjoys tolerable security is to increase in wealth. With the national
wealth, the produce of the customs, of the excise, and of the
post-office, would of course increase; and thus it might well happen
that taxes which, at the beginning of a long reign, were barely
sufficient to support a frugal government in time of peace, might,
before the end of that reign, enable the sovereign to imitate the
extravagance of Nero or Heliogabalus, to raise great armies, to carry
on expensive wars. Something of this sort had actually happened under
Charles the Second, though his reign, reckoned from the Restoration,
lasted only twenty-five years. His first Parliament settled on him taxes
estimated to produce twelve hundred thousand pounds a year. This they
thought sufficient, as they allowed nothing for a standing army in time
of peace. At the time of Charles’s death, the annual produce of these
taxes considerably exceeded a million and a half; and the King
who, during the years which immediately followed his accession, was
perpetually in distress, and perpetually asking his Parliaments for
money, was at last able to keep a body of regular troops without any
assistance from the House of Commons. If his reign had been as long as
that of George the Third, he would probably, before the close of it,
have been in the annual receipt of several millions over and above
what the ordinary expenses of civil government required; and of those
millions he would have been as absolutely master as the King now is
of the sum allotted for his privy-purse. He might have spent them in
luxury, in corruption, in paying troops to overawe his people, or in
carrying into effect wild schemes of foreign conquest. The authors of
the Revolution applied a remedy to this great abuse. They settled on the
King, not the fluctuating produce of certain fixed taxes, but a fixed
sum sufficient for the support of his own royal state. They established
it as a rule that all the expenses of the army, the navy, and the
ordnance should be brought annually under the review of the House of
Commons, and that every sum voted should be applied to the service
specified in the vote. The direct effect of this change was important.
The indirect effect has been more important still. From that time the
House of Commons has been really the paramount power in the State.
It has, in truth, appointed and removed ministers, declared war, and
concluded peace. No combination of the King and the Lords has ever
been able to effect anything against the Lower House, backed by its
constituents. Three or four times, indeed, the sovereign has been able
to break the force of an opposition by dissolving the Parliament. But
if that experiment should fail, if the people should be of the same mind
with their representatives, he would clearly have no course left but to
yield, to abdicate, or to fight.

The next great blessing which we owe to the Revolution is the
purification of the administration of justice in political cases. Of the
importance of this change no person can judge who is not well acquainted
with the earlier volumes of the State Trials. Those volumes are, we do
not hesitate to say, the most frightful record of baseness and depravity
that is extant in the world. Our hatred is altogether turned away from
the crimes and the criminals, and directed against the law and its
ministers. We see villanies as black as ever were imputed to any
prisoner at any bar daily committed on the bench and in the jury-box.
The worst of the bad acts which brought discredit on the old parliaments
of France, the condemnation of Lally, for example, or even that of
Calas, may seem praiseworthy when compared with the atrocities which
follow each other in endless succession as we turn over that huge
chronicle of the shame of England. The magistrates of Paris and Toulouse
were blinded by prejudice, passion, or bigotry. But the abandoned judges
of our own country committed murder with their eyes open. The cause of
this is plain. In France there was no constitutional opposition. If a
man held language offensive to the Government, he was at once sent to
the Bastile or to Vincennes. But in England, at least after the days
of the Long Parliament, the King could not, by a mere act of his
prerogative, rid himself of a troublesome politician. He was forced to
remove those who thwarted him by means of perjured witnesses, packed
juries, and corrupt, hardhearted, browbeating judges. The Opposition
naturally retaliated whenever they had the upper hand. Every time that
the power passed from one party to the other, there was a proscription
and a massacre, thinly disguised under the forms of judicial procedure.
The tribunals ought to be sacred places of refuge, where, in all the
vicissitudes of public affairs, the innocent of all parties may find
shelter. They were, before the Revolution, an unclean public shambles,
to which each party in its turn dragged its opponents, and where each
found the same venal and ferocious butchers waiting for its custom.
Papist or Protestant, Tory or Whig, Priest or Alderman, all was one to
those greedy and savage natures, provided only there was money to earn,
and blood to shed.

Of course, these worthless judges soon created around them, as was
natural, a breed of informers more wicked, if possible, than themselves.
The trial by jury afforded little or no protection to the innocent. The
juries were nominated by the sheriffs. The sheriffs were in most
parts of England nominated by the Crown. In London, the great scene
of political contention, those officers were chosen by the people. The
fiercest parliamentary election of our time will give but a faint notion
of the storm which raged in the city on the day when two infuriated
parties, each bearing its badge, met to select the men in whose hands
were to be the issues of life and death for the coming year. On that
day, nobles of the highest descent did not think it beneath them to
canvass and marshal the livery, to head the procession, and to watch
the poll. On that day, the great chiefs of parties waited in an agony
of suspense for the messenger who was to bring from Guildhall the news
whether their lives and estates were, for the next twelve months, to
be at the mercy of a friend or of a foe. In 1681, Whig sheriffs were
chosen; and Shaftesbury defied the whole power of the Government. In
1682 the sheriffs were Tories. Shaftesbury fled to Holland. The other
chiefs of the party broke up their councils, and retired in haste to
their country seats. Sydney on the scaffold told those sheriffs that his
blood was on their heads. Neither of them could deny the charge; and one
of them wept with shame and remorse.

Thus every man who then meddled with public affairs took his life in his
hand. The consequence was that men of gentle natures stood aloof from
contests in which they could not engage without hazarding their own
necks and the fortunes of their children. This was the course adopted by
Sir William Temple, by Evelyn, and by many other men who were, in every
respect, admirably qualified to serve the State. On the other hand,
those resolute and enterprising men who put their heads and lands to
hazard in the game of politics naturally acquired, from the habit of
playing for so deep a stake, a reckless and desperate turn of mind.
It was, we seriously believe, as safe to be a highwayman as to be a
distinguished leader of Opposition. This may serve to explain, and in
some degree to excuse, the violence with which the factions of that age
are justly reproached. They were fighting, not merely for office, but
for life. If they reposed for a moment from the work of agitation, if
they suffered the public excitement to flag, they were lost men. Hume,
in describing this state of things, has employed an image which seems
hardly to suit the general simplicity of his style, but which is by no
means too strong for the occasion. “Thus,” says he, “the two parties
actuated by mutual rage, but cooped up within the narrow limits of the
law, levelled with poisoned daggers the most deadly blows against each
other’s breast, and buried in their factious divisions all regard to
truth, honour, and humanity.”

From this terrible evil the Revolution set us free. The law which
secured to the judges their seats during life or good behaviour did
something. The law subsequently passed for regulating trials in cases
of treason did much more. The provisions of that law show, indeed, very
little legislative skill. It is not framed on the principle of securing
the innocent, but on the principle of giving a great chance of escape to
the accused, whether innocent or guilty. This, however, is decidedly a
fault on the right side. The evil produced by the occasional escape of
a bad citizen is not to be compared with the evils of that Reign of
Terror, for such it was, which preceded the Revolution. Since the
passing of this law scarcely one single person has suffered death
in England as a traitor, who had not been convicted on overwhelming
evidence, to the satisfaction of all parties, of the highest crime
against the State. Attempts have been made in times of great excitement,
to bring in persons guilty of high treason for acts which, though
sometimes highly blamable, did not necessarily imply a design falling
within the legal definition of treason. All those attempts have
failed. During a hundred and forty years no statesman, while engaged in
constitutional opposition to a government, has had the axe before his
eyes. The smallest minorities, struggling against the most powerful
majorities, in the most agitated times, have felt themselves perfectly
secure. Pulteney and Fox wore the two most distinguished leaders of
Opposition, since the Revolution. Both were personally obnoxious to the
Court. But the utmost harm that the utmost anger of the Court could
do to them was to strike off the “Right Honourable” from before their
names.

But of all the reforms produced by the Revolution, perhaps the most
important was the full establishment of the liberty of unlicensed
printing. The Censorship which, under some form or other, had existed,
with rare and short intermissions, under every government, monarchical
or republican, from the time of Henry the Eighth downwards, expired, and
has never since been renewed.

We are aware that the great improvements which we have recapitulated
were, in many respects, imperfectly and unskilfully executed. The
authors of those improvements sometimes, while they removed or mitigated
a great practical evil, continued to recognise the erroneous principle
from which that evil had sprung. Sometimes, when they had adopted a
sound principle, they shrank from following it to all the conclusions to
which it would have led them. Sometimes they failed to perceive that the
remedies which they applied to one disease of the State were certain to
generate another disease, and to render another remedy necessary. Their
knowledge was inferior to ours: nor were they always able to act up
to their knowledge. The pressure of circumstances, the necessity of
compromising differences of opinion, the power and violence of the party
which was altogether hostile to the new settlement, must be taken into
the account. When these things are fairly weighed, there will, we think,
be little difference of opinion among liberal and right-minded men as to
the real value of what the great events of 1688 did for this country.

We have recounted what appear to us the most important of those changes
which the Revolution produced in our laws. The changes which it produced
in our laws, however, were not more important than the change which
it indirectly produced in the public mind, The Whig party had, during
seventy years, an almost uninterrupted possession of power. It had
always been the fundamental doctrine of that party, that power is a
trust for the people; that it is given to magistrates, not for
their own, but for the public advantage--that, where it is abused by
magistrates, even by the highest of all, it may lawfully be withdrawn.
It is perfectly true, that the Whigs were not more exempt than other men
from the vices and infirmities of our nature, and that, when they had
power, they sometimes abused it. But still they stood firm to their
theory. That theory was the badge of their party. It was something more.
It was the foundation on which rested the power of the houses of Nassau
and Brunswick. Thus, there was a government interested in propagating a
class of opinions which most governments are interested in discouraging,
a government which looked with complacency on all speculations
favourable to public liberty, and with extreme aversion on all
speculations favourable to arbitrary power. There was a King who
decidedly preferred a republican to a believer in the divine right
of kings; who considered every attempt to exalt his prerogative as an
attack on his title; and who reserved all his favours for those who
declaimed on the natural equality of men, and the popular origin of
government. This was the state of things from the Revolution till
the death of George the Second. The effect was what might have been
expected. Even in that profession which has generally been most disposed
to magnify the prerogative, a great change took place. Bishopric
after bishopric and deanery after deanery were bestowed on Whigs and
Latitudinarians. The consequence was that Whiggism and Latitudinarianism
were professed by the ablest and most aspiring churchmen.

Hume complained bitterly of this at the close of his history. “The Whig
party,” says he, “for a course of near seventy years, has almost without
interruption enjoyed the whole authority of government, and no honours
or offices could be obtained but by their countenance and protection.
But this event, which in some particulars has been advantageous to
the State, has proved destructive to the truth of history, and has
established many gross falsehoods, which it is unaccountable how any
civilised nation could have embraced, with regard to its domestic
occurrences. Compositions the most despicable, both for style and
matter,”--in a note he instances the writings of Locke, Sydney, Hoadley,
and Rapin,--“have been extolled and propagated and read as if they had
equalled the most celebrated remains of antiquity. And forgetting that
a regard to liberty, though a laudable passion, ought commonly to be
subservient to a reverence for established government, the prevailing
faction has celebrated only the partisans of the former.” We will
not here enter into an argument about the merit of Rapin’s History or
Locke’s political speculations. We call Hume merely as evidence to a
fact well known to all reading men, that the literature patronised by
the English Court and the English ministry, during the first half of
the eighteenth century, was of that kind which courtiers and ministers
generally do all in their power to discountenance, and tended to
inspire zeal for the liberties of the people rather than respect for the
authority of the Government.

There was still a very strong Tory party in England. But that party was
in opposition. Many of its members still held the doctrine of passive
obedience. But they did not admit that the existing dynasty had any
claim to such obedience. They condemned resistance. But by resistance
they meant the keeping out of James the Third, and not the turning out
of George the Second. No radical of our times could grumble more at the
expenses of the royal household, could exert himself more strenuously
to reduce the military establishment, could oppose with more earnestness
every proposition for arming the executive with extraordinary powers, or
could pour more unmitigated abuse on placemen and courtiers. If a writer
were now, in a massive Dictionary, to define a Pensioner as a traitor
and a slave, the Excise as a hateful tax, the Commissioners of the
Excise as wretches, if he were to write a satire full of reflections on
men who receive “the price of boroughs and of souls,” who “explain their
country’s dear-bought rights away,” or

                        “whom pensions can incite,

               To vote a patriot black, a courtier white,”

we should set him down for something more democratic than a Whig. Yet
this was the language which Johnson, the most bigoted of Tories and High
Churchmen held under the administration of Walpole and Pelham.

Thus doctrines favourable to public liberty were inculcated alike by
those who were in power and by those who were in opposition. It was by
means of these doctrines alone that the former could prove that they had
a King de jure. The servile theories of the latter did not prevent them
from offering every molestation to one whom they considered as merely a
King de facto. The attachment of one party to the House of Hanover, of
the other to that of Stuart, induced both to talk a language much more
favourable to popular rights than to monarchical power. What took place
at the first representation of Cato is no bad illustration of the way in
which the two great sections of the community almost invariably acted.
A play, the whole merit of which consists in its stately rhetoric
sometimes not unworthy of Lucan, about hating tyrants and dying
for freedom, is brought on the stage in a time of great political
excitement. Both parties crowd to the theatre. Each affects to consider
every line as a compliment to itself, and an attack on its opponents.
The curtain falls amidst an unanimous roar of applause. The Whigs of
the Kit Cat embrace the author, and assure him that he has rendered an
inestimable service to liberty. The Tory secretary of state presents a
purse to the chief actor for defending the cause of liberty so well. The
history of that night was, in miniature, the history of two generations.

We well know how much sophistry there was in the reasonings, and how
much exaggeration in the declamations of both parties. But when we
compare the state in which political science was at the close of the
reign of George the Second with the state in which it had been when
James the Second came to the throne, it is impossible not to admit that
a prodigious improvement had taken place. We are no admirers of the
political doctrines laid down in Blackstone’s Commentaries. But if we
consider that those Commentaries were read with great applause in the
very schools where, seventy or eighty years before, books had been
publicly burned by order of the University of Oxford for containing the
damnable doctrine that the English monarchy is limited and mixed, we
cannot deny that a salutary change had taken place. “The Jesuits,” says
Pascal, in the last of his incomparable letters, “have obtained a Papal
decree, condemning Galileo’s doctrine about the motion of the earth.
It is all in vain. If the world is really turning round, all mankind
together will not be able to keep it from turning, or to keep themselves
from turning with it.” The decrees of Oxford were as ineffectual to stay
the great moral and political revolution as those of the Vatican to stay
the motion of our globe. That learned University found itself not only
unable to keep the mass from moving, but unable to keep itself from
moving along with the mass. Nor was the effect of the discussions and
speculations of that period confined to our own country. While the
Jacobite party was in the last dotage and weakness of its paralytic
old age, the political philosophy of England began to produce a mighty
effect on France, and, through France, on Europe.

Here another vast field opens itself before us. But we must resolutely
turn away from it. We will conclude by advising all our readers to study
Sir James Mackintosh’s valuable Fragment, and by expressing our hope
that they will soon be able to study it without those accompaniments
which have hitherto impeded its circulation.

HORACE WALPOLE

(October 1833)
_Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann, British
Envoy at the Court of Tuscany. Now first published from the Originals in
the Possession of the EARL OF WALDEGRAVE. Edited by LORD DOVER 2 vols.
8vo. London: 1833._

WE cannot transcribe this title-page without strong feelings of regret.
The editing of these volumes was the last of the useful and modest
services rendered to literature by a nobleman of amiable manners, of
untarnished public and private character, and of cultivated mind. On
this, as on other occasions, Lord Dover performed his part diligently,
judiciously, and without the slightest ostentation. He had two merits
which are rarely found together in a commentator, he was content to
be merely a commentator, to keep in the background, and to leave the
foreground to the author whom he had undertaken to illustrate. Yet,
though willing to be an attendant, he was by no means a slave; nor did
he consider it as part of his duty to see no faults in the writer
to whom he faithfully and assiduously rendered the humblest literary
offices.

The faults of Horace Walpole’s head and heart are indeed sufficiently
glaring. His writings, it is true, rank as high among the delicacies of
intellectual epicures as the Strasburg pies among the dishes described
in the Almanach des Gourmands. But as the pate-de-foie-gras owes its
excellence to the diseases of the wretched animal which furnishes
it, and would be good for nothing if it were not made of livers
preternaturally swollen, so none but an unhealthy and disorganised mind
could have produced such literary luxuries as the works of Walpole.

He was, unless we have formed a very erroneous judgment of his
character, the most eccentric, the most artificial, the most fastidious,
the most capricious of men. His mind was a bundle of inconsistent whims
and affectations. His features were covered by mask within mask. When
the outer disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you were still
as far as ever from seeing the real man. He played innumerable parts and
over-acted them all. When he talked misanthropy, he out-Timoned Timon.
When he talked philanthropy, he left Howard at an immeasurable distance.
He scoffed at courts, and kept a chronicle of their most trifling
scandal; at society, and was blown about by its slightest veerings of
opinion; at literary fame, and left fair copies of his private letters,
with copious notes, to be published after his decease; at rank, and
never for a moment forgot that he was an Honourable; at the practice of
entail, and tasked the ingenuity of conveyancers to tie up his villa in
the strictest settlement.

The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to
him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little. Serious business
was a trifle to him, and trifles were his serious business. To chat with
blue-stockings, to write little copies of complimentary verses on little
occasions, to superintend a private press, to preserve from natural
decay the perishable topics of Ranelagh and White’s, to record divorces
and bets, Miss Chudleigh’s absurdities and George Selwyn’s good sayings,
to decorate a grotesque house with pie-crust battlements, to procure
rare engravings and antique chimney-boards, to match odd gauntlets,
to lay out a maze of walks within five acres of ground, these were the
grave employments of his long life. From these he turned to politics
as to an amusement. After the labours of the print-shop and the
auction-room, he unbent his mind in the House of Commons. And, having
indulged in the recreation of making laws and voting millions, he
returned to more important pursuits, to researches after Queen Mary’s
comb, Wolsey’s red hat, the pipe which Van Tromp smoked during his last
sea-fight, and the spur which King William struck into the flank of
Sorrel.

In everything in which Walpole busied himself, in the fine arts, in
literature, in public affairs, he was drawn by some strange attraction
from the great to the little, and from the useful to the odd. The
politics in which he took the keenest interests, were politics
scarcely deserving of the name. The growlings of George the Second, the
flirtations of Princess Emily with the Duke of Grafton, the amours of
Prince Frederic and Lady Middlesex, the squabbles between Gold Stick in
waiting and the Master of the Buckhounds, the disagreements between the
tutors of Prince George, these matters engaged almost all the attention
which Walpole could spare from matters more important still, from
bidding for Zinckes and Petitots, from cheapening fragments of tapestry
and handles of old lances, from joining bits of painted glass, and from
setting up memorials of departed cats and dogs. While he was fetching
and carrying the gossip of Kensington Palace and Carlton House, he
fancied that he was engaged in politics, and when he recorded that
gossip, he fancied that he was writing history.

He was, as he has himself told us, fond of faction as an amusement. He
loved mischief: but he loved quiet; and he was constantly on the watch
for opportunities of gratifying both his tastes at once. He sometimes
contrived, without showing himself, to disturb the course of ministerial
negotiations, and to spread confusion through the political circles. He
does not himself pretend that, on these occasions, he was actuated by
public spirit; nor does he appear to have had any private advantage in
view. He thought it a good practical joke to set public men together
by the ears; and he enjoyed their perplexities, their accusations, and
their recriminations, as a malicious boy enjoys the embarrassment of a
misdirected traveller.

About politics, in the high sense of the word, he knew nothing, and
cared nothing. He called himself a Whig. His father’s son could scarcely
assume any other name. It pleased him also to affect a foolish dislike
of kings as kings, and a foolish love and admiration of rebels as
rebels; and perhaps, while kings were not in danger, and while rebels
were not in being, he really believed that he held the doctrines which
he professed. To go no further than the letters now before us, he is
perpetually boasting to his friend Mann of his aversion to royalty
and to royal persons. He calls the crime of Damien “that least bad of
murders, the murder of a king.” He hung up in his villa an engraving of
the death-warrant of Charles, with the inscription “Major Charta.” Yet
the most superficial knowledge of history might have taught him that the
Restoration, and the crimes and follies of the twenty-eight years which
followed the Restoration, were the effects of this Greater Charter. Nor
was there much in the means by which that instrument was obtained that
could gratify a judicious lover of liberty. A man must hate kings very
bitterly, before he can think it desirable that the representatives of
the people should be turned out of doors by dragoons, in order to get at
a king’s head. Walpole’s Whiggism, however, was of a very harmless kind.
He kept it, as he kept the old spears and helmets at Strawberry Hill,
merely for show. He would just as soon have thought of taking down the
arms of the ancient Templars and Hospitallers from the walls of his
hall, and setting off on a crusade to the Holy Land, as of acting in
the spirit of those daring warriors and statesmen, great even in their
errors, whose names and seals were affixed to the warrant which he
prized so highly. He liked revolution and regicide only when they were
a hundred years old. His republicanism, like the courage of a bully, or
the love of a fribble, was strong and ardent when there was no occasion
for it, and subsided when he had an opportunity of bringing it to the
proof. As soon as the revolutionary spirit really began to stir in
Europe, as soon as the hatred of kings became something more than a
sonorous phrase, he was frightened into a fanatical royalist, and became
one of the most extravagant alarmists of those wretched times. In
truth, his talk about liberty, whether he knew it or not, was from the
beginning a mere cant, the remains of a phraseology which had meant
something in the mouths of those from whom he had learned it, but which,
in his mouth, meant about as much as the oath by which the Knights of
some modern orders bind themselves to redress the wrongs of all injured
ladies. He had been fed in his boyhood with Whig speculations on
government. He must often have seen, at Houghton or in Downing Street,
men who had been Whigs when it was as dangerous to be a Whig as to be
a highwayman, men who had voted for the Exclusion Bill, who had been
concealed in garrets and cellars after the battle of Sedgemoor, and who
had set their names to the declaration that they would live and die with
the Prince of Orange. He had acquired the language of these men, and he
repeated it by rote, though it was at variance with all his tastes and
feelings; just as some old Jacobite families persisted in praying for
the Pretender, and in passing their glasses over the water decanter
when they drank the King’s health, long after they had become loyal
supporters of the government of George the Third. He was a Whig by the
accident of hereditary connection; but he was essentially a courtier;
and not the less a courtier because he pretended to sneer at the objects
which excited his admiration and envy. His real tastes perpetually show
themselves through the thin disguise. While professing all the contempt
of Bradshaw or Ludlow for crowned heads, he took the trouble to write a
book concerning Royal Authors. He pryed with the utmost anxiety into
the most minute particulars relating to the Royal family. When, he was
a child, he was haunted with a longing to see George the First, and
gave his mother no peace till she had found a way of gratifying his
curiosity. The same feeling, covered with a thousand disguises, attended
him to the grave. No observation that dropped from the lips of Majesty
seemed to him too trifling to be recorded. The French songs of Prince
Frederic, compositions certainly not deserving of preservation on
account of their intrinsic merit, have been carefully preserved for us
by this contemner of royalty. In truth, every page of Walpole’s works
betrays him. This Diogenes, who would be thought to prefer his tub to
a palace, and who has nothing to ask of the masters of Windsor
and Versailles but that they will stand out of his light, is a
gentleman-usher at heart.

He had, it is plain, an uneasy consciousness of the frivolity of his
favourite pursuits; and this consciousness produced one of the most
diverting of his ten thousand affectations. His busy idleness, his
indifference to matters which the world generally regards as important,
his passion for trifles, he thought fit to dignify with the name of
philosophy. He spoke of himself as of a man whose equanimity was proof
to ambitious hopes and fears, who had learned to rate power, wealth, and
fame at their true value, and whom the conflict of parties, the rise and
fall of statesmen, the ebb and flow of public opinion, moved only to a
smile of mingled compassion and disdain. It was owing to the peculiar
elevation of his character that he cared about a pinnacle of lath and
plaster more than about the Middlesex election, and about a miniature of
Grammont more than about the American Revolution. Pitt and Murray might
talk themselves hoarse about trifles. But questions of government
and war were too insignificant to detain a mind which was occupied in
recording the scandal of club-rooms and the whispers of the back-stairs,
and which was even capable of selecting and disposing chairs of ebony
and shields of rhinoceros-skin.

One of his innumerable whims was an extreme unwillingness to be
considered a man of letters. Not that he was indifferent to literary
fame. Far from it. Scarcely any writer has ever troubled himself so much
about the appearance which his works were to make before posterity.
But he had set his heart on incompatible objects. He wished to be a
celebrated author, and yet to be a mere idle gentleman, one of those
Epicurean gods of the earth who do nothing at all, and who pass their
existence in the contemplation of their own perfections. He did not like
to have anything in common with the wretches who lodged in the little
courts behind St. Martin’s Church, and stole out on Sundays to dine
with their bookseller. He avoided the society of authors. He spoke with
lordly contempt of the most distinguished among them. He tried to find
out some way of writing books, as M. Jourdain’s father sold cloth,
without derogating from his character of Gentilhomme. “Lui, marchand?
C’est pure médisance: il ne l’a jamais été. Tout ce qu’il faisait, c’est
qu’il était fort obligeant, fort officieux; et comme il se connaissait
fort bien en étoffes, il en allait choisir de tons les cotes, les
faisait apporter chez lui, et en donnait a ses amis pour de l’argent.”
There are several amusing instances of Walpole’s feeling on this subject
in the letters now before us. Mann had complimented him on the learning
which appeared in the Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors; and it is
curious to see how impatiently Walpole bore the imputation of having
attended to anything so unfashionable as the improvement of his mind.
“I know nothing. How should I? I who have always lived in the big busy
world; who lie a-bed all the morning, calling it morning as long as you
please; who sup in company; who have played at faro half my life, and
now at loo till two and three in the morning; who have always loved
pleasure; haunted auctions.... How I have laughed when some of the
Magazines have called me the learned gentleman. Pray don’t be like the
Magazines.” This folly might be pardoned in a boy. But a man between
forty and fifty years old, as Walpole then was, ought to be quite as
much ashamed of playing at loo till three every morning as of being that
vulgar thing, a learned gentleman.

The literary character has undoubtedly its full share of faults, and of
very serious and offensive faults. If Walpole had avoided those faults,
we could have pardoned the fastidiousness with which he declined all
fellowship with men of learning. But from those faults Walpole was not
one jot more free than the garreteers from whose contact he shrank. Of
literary meannesses and literary vices, his life and his works contain
as many instances as the life and the works of any member of Johnson’s
club. The fact is, that Walpole had the faults of Grub Street, with a
large addition from St. James’s Street, the vanity, the jealousy, and
the irritability of a man of letters, the affected superciliousness and
apathy of a man of ton.

His judgment of literature, of contemporary literature especially, was
altogether perverted by his aristocratical feelings. No writer surely
was ever guilty of so much false and absurd criticism. He almost
invariably speaks with contempt of those books which are now universally
allowed to be the best that appeared in his time; and, on the other
hand, he speaks of writers of rank and fashion as if they were entitled
to the same precedence in literature which would have been allowed to
them in a drawing-room. In these letters, for example, he says that he
would rather have written the most absurd lines in Lee than Thomson’s
Seasons. The periodical paper called The World, on the other hand, was
by “our first writers.” Who, then, were the first writers of England in
the year 1750? Walpole has told us in a note. Our readers will probably
guess that Hume, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Johnson, Warburton,
Collins, Akenside, Gray, Dyer, Young, Warton, Mason, or some of those
distinguished men, were in the list. Not one of them. Our first writers,
it seems, were Lord Chesterfield, Lord Bath, Mr. W. Whithed, Sir Charles
Williams, Mr. Soame Jenyns, Mr. Cambridge, Mr. Coventry. Of these
seven personages, Whithed was the lowest in station, but was the most
accomplished tuft-hunter of his time. Coventry was of a noble family.
The other five had among them two seats in the House of Lords, two seats
in the House of Commons, three seats in the Privy Council, a baronetcy,
a blue riband, a red riband, about a hundred thousand pounds a year,
and not ten pages that are worth reading. The writings of Whithed,
Cambridge, Coventry, and Lord Bath are forgotten. Soame Jenyns is
remembered chiefly by Johnson’s review of the foolish Essay on the
Origin of Evil. Lord Chesterfield stands much lower in the estimation
of posterity than he would have done if his letters had never been
published. The lampoons of Sir Charles Williams are now read only by the
curious, and, though not without occasional flashes of wit, have always
seemed to us, we must own, very poor performances.

Walpole judged of French literature after the same fashion. He
understood and loved the French language. Indeed, he loved it too well.
His style is more deeply tainted with Gallicism than that of any other
English writer with whom we are acquainted. His composition often reads,
for a page together, like a rude translation from the French. We meet
every minute with such sentences as these, “One knows what temperaments
Annibal Caracci painted.” “The impertinent personage!” “She is dead
rich.” “Lord Dalkeith is dead of the small-pox in three days.” “It will
now be seen whether he or they are most patriot.”

His love of the French language was of a peculiar kind. He loved it
as having been for a century the vehicle of all the polite nothings of
Europe, as the sign by which the freemasons of fashion recognised each
other in every capital from Petersburgh to Naples, as the language of
raillery, as the language of anecdote, as the language of memoirs,
as the language of correspondence. Its higher uses he altogether
disregarded. The literature of France has been to ours what Aaron was to
Moses, the expositor of great truths which would else have perished
for want of a voice to utter them with distinctness. The relation which
existed between Mr. Bentham and M. Dumont is an exact illustration
of the intellectual relation in which the two countries stand to each
other. The great discoveries in physics, in metaphysics, in political
science, are ours. But scarcely any foreign nation except France
has received them from us by direct communication. Isolated by our
situation, isolated by our manners, we found truth, but we did not
impart it. France has been the interpreter between England and mankind.

In the time of Walpole, this process of interpretation was in full
activity. The great French writers were busy in proclaiming through
Europe the names of Bacon, of Newton, and of Locke. The English
principles of toleration, the English respect for personal liberty, the
English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good,
were making rapid progress. There is scarcely anything in history
so interesting as that great stirring up of the mind of France, that
shaking of the foundations of all established opinions, that uprooting
of old truth and old error. It was plain that mighty principles were at
work whether for evil or for good. It was plain that a great change
in the whole social system was at hand. Fanatics of one kind might
anticipate a golden age, in which men should live under the simple
dominion of reason, in perfect equality and perfect amity, without
property, or marriage, or king, or God. A fanatic of another kind
might see nothing in the doctrines of the philosophers but anarchy and
atheism, might cling more closely to every old abuse, and might regret
the good old days when St. Dominic and Simon de Montfort put down the
growing heresies of Provence. A wise man would have seen with regret the
excesses into which the reformers were running; but he would have
done justice to their genius and to their philanthropy. He would have
censured their errors; but he would have remembered that, as Milton
has said, error is but opinion in the making. While he condemned their
hostility to religion, he would have acknowledged that it was the
natural effect of a system under which religion had been constantly
exhibited to them in forms which common sense rejected and at which
humanity shuddered. While he condemned some of their political doctrines
as incompatible with all law, all property, and all civilisation, he
would have acknowledged that the subjects of Lewis the Fifteenth had
every excuse which men could have for being eager to pull down, and for
being ignorant of the far higher art of setting up. While anticipating a
fierce conflict, a great and wide-wasting destruction, he would yet have
looked forward to the final close with a good hope for France and for
mankind.

Walpole had neither hopes nor fears. Though the most Frenchified English
writer of the eighteenth century, he troubled himself little about the
portents which were daily to be discerned in the French literature
of his time. While the most eminent Frenchmen were studying with
enthusiastic delight English politics and English philosophy, he was
studying as intently the gossip of the old court of France. The fashions
and scandal of Versailles and Marli, fashions and scandal a hundred
years old, occupied him infinitely more than a great moral revolution
which was taking place in his sight. He took a prodigious interest in
every noble sharper whose vast volume of wig and infinite length of
riband had figured at the dressing or at the tucking up of Lewis the
Fourteenth, and of every profligate woman of quality who had carried her
train of lovers backward and forward from king to parliament, and from
parliament to king, during the wars of the Fronde. These were the people
of whom he treasured up the smallest memorial, of whom he loved to hear
the most trifling anecdote, and for whose likenesses he would have given
any price. Of the great French writers of his own time, Montesquieu is
the only one of whom he speaks with enthusiasm. And even of Montesquieu
he speaks with less enthusiasm than of that abject thing, Crebillon the
younger, a scribbler as licentious as Louvet and as dull as Rapin. A man
must be strangely constituted who can take interest in pedantic journals
of the blockades laid by the Duke of A. to the hearts of the Marquise
de B. and the Comtesse de C. This trash Walpole extols in language
sufficiently high for the merits of Don Quixote. He wished to possess a
likeness of Crebillon; and Liotard, the first painter of miniatures then
living, was employed to preserve the features of the profligate dunce.
The admirer of the Sopha and of the Lettres Atheniennes had little
respect to spare for the men who were then at the head of French
literature. He kept carefully out of their way. He tried to keep other
people from paying them any attention. He could not deny that Voltaire
and Rousseau were clever men; but he took every opportunity of
depreciating them. Of D’Alembert he spoke with a contempt which, when
the intellectual powers of the two men are compared, seems exquisitely
ridiculous. D’Alembert complained that he was accused of having written
Walpole’s squib against Rousseau. “I hope,” says Walpole, “that nobody
will attribute D’Alembert’s works to me.” He was in little danger.

It is impossible to deny, however, that Walpole’s writings have real
merit, and merit of a very rare, though not of a very high kind. Sir
Joshua Reynolds used to say that, though nobody would for a moment
compare Claude to Raphael, there would be another Raphael before there
was another Claude. And we own that we expect to see fresh Humes and
fresh Burkes before we again fall in with that peculiar combination of
moral and intellectual qualities to which the writings of Walpole owe
their extraordinary popularity.

It is easy to describe him by negatives. He had not a creative
imagination. He had not a pure taste. He was not a great reasoner. There
is indeed scarcely any writer in whose works it would be possible to
find so many contradictory judgments, so many sentences of extravagant
nonsense. Nor was it only in his familiar correspondence that he wrote
in this flighty and inconsistent manner, but in long and elaborate
books, in books repeatedly transcribed and intended for the public eye.
We will give an instance or two; for without instances readers not very
familiar with his works will scarcely understand our meaning. In the
Anecdotes of Painting, he states, very truly, that the art declined
after the commencement of the civil wars. He proceeds to inquire why
this happened. The explanation, we should have thought, would have been
easily found. He might have mentioned the loss of a king who was the
most munificent and judicious patron that the fine arts have ever had in
England, the troubled state of the country, the distressed condition of
many of the aristocracy, perhaps also the austerity of the victorious
party. These circumstances, we conceive, fully account for the
phaenomenon. But this solution was not odd enough to satisfy Walpole. He
discovers another cause for the decline of the art, the want of models.
Nothing worth painting, it seems, was left to paint. “How picturesque,”
he exclaims, “was the figure of an Anabaptist!”--as if puritanism had
put out the sun and withered the trees; as if the civil wars had blotted
out the expression of character and passion from the human lip and brow;
as if many of the men whom Vandyke painted had not been living in the
time of the Commonwealth, with faces little the worse for wear; as if
many of the beauties afterwards portrayed by Lely were not in their
prime before the Restoration; as if the garb or the features of Cromwell
and Milton were less picturesque than those of the round-faced peers,
as like each other as eggs to eggs, who look out from the middle of the
periwigs of Kneller. In the Memoirs, again, Walpole sneers at the Prince
of Wales, afterwards George the Third, for presenting a collection of
books to one of the American colleges during the Seven Years’ War, and
says that, instead of books, his Royal Highness ought to have sent
arms and ammunition, as if a war ought to suspend all study and all
education; or as if it were the business of the Prince of Wales to
supply the colonies with military stores out of his own pocket. We have
perhaps dwelt too long on these passages; but we have done so because
they are specimens of Walpole’s manner. Everybody who reads his
works with attention will find that they swarm with loose and foolish
observations like those which we have cited; observations which might
pass in conversation or in a hasty letter, but which are unpardonable in
books deliberately written and repeatedly corrected.

He appears to have thought that he saw very far into men; but we are
under the necessity of altogether dissenting from his opinion. We do
not conceive that he had any power of discerning the finer shades of
character. He practised an art, however, which, though easy and even
vulgar, obtains for those who practise it the reputation of discernment
with ninety-nine people out of a hundred. He sneered at everybody, put
on every action the worst construction which it would bear, “spelt every
man backward,” to borrow the Lady Hero’s phrase,

               “Turned every man the wrong side out,

               And never gave to truth and virtue that

               Which simpleness and merit purchaseth.”

In this way any man may, with little sagacity and little trouble, be
considered by those whose good opinion is not worth having as a great
judge of character.

It is said that the hasty and rapacious Kneller used to send away the
ladies who sate to him as soon as he had sketched their faces, and to
paint the figure and hands from his housemaid. It was in much the same
way that Walpole portrayed the minds of others. He copied from the life
only those glaring and obvious peculiarities which could not escape the
most superficial observation. The rest of the canvas he filled up, in a
careless dashing way, with knave and fool, mixed in such proportions as
pleased Heaven. What a difference between these daubs and the masterly
portraits of Clarendon!

There are contradictions without end in the sketches of character which
abound in Walpole’s works. But if we were to form our opinion of his
eminent contemporaries from a general survey of what he has written
concerning them, we should say that Pitt was a strutting, ranting,
mouthing actor, Charles Townshend an impudent and voluble jack-pudding,
Murray a demure, cold-blooded, cowardly hypocrite, Hardwicke an insolent
upstart, with the understanding of a pettifogger and the heart of
a hangman, Temple an impertinent poltroon, Egmont a solemn coxcomb,
Lyttelton a poor creature whose only wish was to go to heaven in a
coronet, Onslow a pompous proser, Washington a braggart, Lord Camden
sullen, Lord Townshend malevolent, Secker an atheist who had shammed
Christian for a mitre, Whitefield an impostor who swindled his converts
out of their watches. The Walpoles fare little better than their
neighbours. Old Horace is constantly represented as a coarse, brutal,
niggardly buffoon, and his son as worthy of such a father. In short, if
we are to trust this discerning judge of human nature, England in his
time contained little sense and no virtue, except what was distributed
between himself, Lord Waldegrave, and Marshal Conway.

Of such a writer it is scarcely necessary to say, that his works are
destitute of every charm which is derived from elevation, or
from tenderness of sentiment. When he chose to be humane and
magnanimous,--for he sometimes, by way of variety, tried this
affectation,--he overdid his part most ludicrously. None of his many
disguises sat so awkwardly upon him. For example, he tells us that he
did not choose to be intimate with Mr. Pitt. And why? Because Mr.
Pitt had been among the persecutors of his father? Or because, as he
repeatedly assures us, Mr. Pitt was a disagreeable man in private? Not
at all; but because Mr. Pitt was too fond of war, and was great with too
little reluctance. Strange that a habitual scoffer like Walpole should
imagine that this cant could impose on the dullest reader! If Moliere
had put such a speech into the mouth of Tartuffe, we should have said
that the fiction was unskilful, and that Orgon could not have been such
a fool as to be taken in by it. Of the twenty-six years during which
Walpole sat in Parliament, thirteen were years of war. Yet he did not,
during all those thirteen years, utter a single word or give a single
vote tending to peace. His most intimate friend, the only friend,
indeed, to whom he appears to have been sincerely attached, Conway, was
a soldier, was fond of his profession, and was perpetually entreating
Mr. Pitt to give him employment. In this Walpole saw nothing but
what was admirable. Conway was a hero for soliciting the command of
expeditions which Mr. Pitt was a monster for sending out.

What then is the charm, the irresistible charm, of Walpole’s writings?
It consists, we think, in the art of amusing without exciting. He never
convinces the reason or fills the imagination, or touches the heart;
but he keeps the mind of the reader constantly attentive and constantly
entertained. He had a strange ingenuity peculiarly his own, an ingenuity
which appeared in all that he did, in his building, in his gardening, in
his upholstery, in the matter and in the manner of his writings. If we
were to adopt the classification, not a very accurate classification,
which Akenside has given of the pleasures of the imagination, we should
say that with the Sublime and the Beautiful Walpole had nothing to do,
but that the third province, the Odd, was his peculiar domain. The motto
which he prefixed to his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors might have
been inscribed with perfect propriety over the door of every room in his
house, and on the title-page of every one of his books; “Dove Diavolo,
Messer Ludovico, avete pigliate tante coglionerie?” In his villa, every
apartment is a museum; every piece of furniture is a curiosity; there
is something strange in the form of the shovel; there is a long story
belonging to the bell-rope. We wander among a profusion of rarities, of
trifling intrinsic value, but so quaint in fashion, or connected
with such remarkable names and events, that they may well detain our
attention for a moment. A moment is enough. Some new relic, some new
unique, some new carved work, some new enamel, is forthcoming in an
instant. One cabinet of trinkets is no sooner closed than another is
opened. It is the same with Walpole’s writings. It is not in their
utility, it is not in their beauty, that their attraction lies. They are
to the works of great historians and poets, what Strawberry Hill is to
the Museum of Sir Hans Sloane or to the Gallery of Florence. Walpole is
constantly showing us things, not of very great value indeed, yet things
which we are pleased to see, and which we can see nowhere else. They
are baubles; but they are made curiosities either by his grotesque
workmanship or by some association belonging to them. His style is one
of those peculiar styles by which everybody is attracted, and which
nobody can safely venture to imitate. He is a mannerist whose manner
has become perfectly easy to him, His affectation is so habitual and so
universal that it can hardly be called affectation. The affectation
is the essence of the man. It pervades all his thoughts and all his
expressions. If it were taken away, nothing would be left. He coins new
words, distorts the senses of old words, and twists sentences into forms
which make grammarians stare. But all this he does, not only with an
air of ease, but as if he could not help doing it. His wit was, in its
essential properties, of the same kind with that of Cowley and Donne.
Like theirs, it consisted in an exquisite perception of points of
analogy and points of contrast too subtile for common observation. Like
them, Walpole perpetually startles us by the ease with which he yokes
together ideas between which there would seem, at first sight, to be no
connection. But he did not, like them, affect the gravity of a lecture,
and draw his illustrations from the laboratory and from the schools. His
tone was light and fleeting; his topics were the topics of the club and
the ballroom; and therefore his strange combinations and far-fetched
allusions, though very closely resembling those which tire us to death
in the poems of the time of Charles the First, are read with pleasure
constantly new.

No man who has written so much is so seldom tiresome. In his books there
are scarcely any of those passages which, in our school-days, we used to
call skip. Yet he often wrote on subjects which are generally considered
as dull, on subjects which men of great talents have in vain endeavoured
to render popular. When we compare the Historic Doubts about Richard
the Third with Whitaker’s and Chalmers’s books on a far more interesting
question, the character of Mary Queen of Scots; when we compare the
Anecdotes of Painting with the works of Anthony Wood, of Nichols, of
Granger, we at once see Walpole’s superiority, not in industry, not
in learning, not in accuracy, not in logical power, but in the art of
writing what people will like to read. He rejects all but the attractive
parts of his subject. He keeps only what is in itself amusing or what
can be made so by the artifice of his diction. The coarser morsels
of antiquarian learning he abandons to others, and sets out an
entertainment worthy of a Roman epicure, an entertainment consisting of
nothing but delicacies, the brains of singing birds, the roe of mullets,
the sunny halves of peaches. This, we think, is the great merit of his
romance. There is little skill in the delineation of the characters.
Manfred is as commonplace a tyrant, Jerome as commonplace a confessor,
Theodore as commonplace a young gentleman, Isabella and Matilda as
commonplace a pair of young ladies, as are to be found in any of the
thousand Italian castles in which condottieri have revelled or in which
imprisoned duchesses have pined. We cannot say that we much admire the
big man whose sword is dug up in one quarter of the globe, whose helmet
drops from the clouds in another, and who, after clattering and rustling
for some days, ends by kicking the house down. But the story, whatever
its value may be, never flags for a single moment. There are no
digressions, or unseasonable descriptions, or long speeches. Every
sentence carries the action forward. The excitement is constantly
renewed. Absurd as is the machinery, insipid as are the human actors, no
reader probably ever thought the book dull.

Walpole’s Letters are generally considered as his best performances,
and, we think, with reason. His faults are far less offensive to us
in his correspondence than in his books. His wild, absurd, and
ever-changing opinions about men and things are easily pardoned in
familiar letters. His bitter, scoffing, depreciating disposition does
not show itself in so unmitigated a manner as in his Memoirs. A writer
of letters must in general be civil and friendly to his correspondent at
least, if to no other person.

He loved letter-writing, and had evidently studied it as an art. It
was, in truth, the very kind of writing for such a man, for a man very
ambitious to rank among wits, yet nervously afraid that, while obtaining
the reputation of a wit, he might lose caste as a gentleman. There was
nothing vulgar in writing a letter. Not even Ensign Northerton, not
even the Captain described in Hamilton’s Bawn,--and Walpole, though the
author of many quartos, had some feelings in common with those gallant
officers,--would have denied that a gentleman might sometimes correspond
with a friend. Whether Walpole bestowed much labour on the composition
of his letters, it is impossible to judge from internal evidence. There
are passages which seem perfectly unstudied. But the appearance of
ease may be the effect of labour. There are passages which have a very
artificial air. But they may have been produced without effort by a mind
of which the natural ingenuity had been improved into morbid quickness
by constant exercise. We are never sure that we see him as he was. We
are never sure that what appears to be nature is not disguised art. We
are never sure that what appears to be art is not merely habit which has
become second nature.

In wit and animation the present collection is not superior to those
which have preceded it. But it has one great advantage over them all. It
forms a connected whole, a regular journal of what appeared to Walpole
the most important transactions of the last twenty years of George the
Second’s reign. It furnishes much new information concerning the history
of that time, the portion of English history of which common readers
know the least.

The earlier letters contain the most lively and interesting account
which we possess of that “great Walpolean battle,” to use the words of
Junius, which terminated in the retirement of Sir Robert. Horace entered
the House of Commons just in time to witness the last desperate struggle
which his father, surrounded by enemies and traitors, maintained, with
a spirit as brave as that of the column of Fontenoy, first for victory,
and then for honourable retreat. Horace was, of course, on the side of
his family. Lord Dover seems to have been enthusiastic on the same side,
and goes so far as to call Sir Robert “the glory of the Whigs.”

Sir Robert deserved this high eulogium, we think, as little as he
deserved the abusive epithets which have often been coupled with his
name. A fair character of him still remains to be drawn; and, whenever
it shall be drawn, it will be equally unlike the portrait by Coxe and
the portrait by Smollett.

He had, undoubtedly, great talents and great virtues. He was not,
indeed, like the leaders of the party which opposed his government, a
brilliant orator. He was not a profound scholar, like Carteret, or a
wit and a fine gentleman, like Chesterfield. In all these respects his
deficiencies were remarkable. His literature consisted of a scrap or
two of Horace and an anecdote or two from the end of the Dictionary.
His knowledge of history was so limited that, in the great debate on the
Excise Bill, he was forced to ask Attorney-General Yorke who Empson and
Dudley were. His manners were a little too coarse and boisterous even
for that age of Westerns and Topehalls. When he ceased to talk of
politics, he could talk of nothing but women and he dilated on his
favourite theme with a freedom which shocked even that plain-spoken
generation, and which was quite unsuited to his age and station. The
noisy revelry of his summer festivities at Houghton gave much scandal
to grave people, and annually drove his kinsman and colleague, Lord
Townshend, from the neighbouring mansion of Rainham.

But, however ignorant Walpole might be of general history and of general
literature, he was better acquainted than any man of his day with what
it concerned him most to know, mankind, the English nation, the Court,
the House of Commons, and the Treasury. Of foreign affairs he knew
little; but his judgment was so good that his little knowledge went
very far. He was an excellent parliamentary debater, an excellent
parliamentary tactician, an excellent man of business. No man ever
brought more industry or more method to the transacting of affairs. No
minister in his time did so much; yet no minister had so much leisure.

He was a good-natured man who had during thirty years seen nothing but
the worst parts of human nature in other men. He was familiar with the
malice of kind people, and the perfidy of honourable people. Proud men
had licked the dust before him. Patriots had begged him to come up to
the price of their puffed and advertised integrity. He said after his
fall that it was a dangerous thing to be a minister, that there were few
minds which would not be injured by the constant spectacle of meanness
and depravity. To his honour it must be confessed that few minds have
come out of such a trial so little damaged in the most important parts.
He retired, after more than twenty years of supreme power, with a temper
not soured, with a heart not hardened, with simple tastes, with frank
manners, and with a capacity for friendship. No stain of treachery, of
ingratitude, or of cruelty rests on his memory. Factious hatred, while
flinging on his name every other foul aspersion, was compelled to own
that he was not a man of blood. This would scarcely seem a high
eulogium on a statesman of our times. It was then a rare and honourable
distinction. The contests of parties in England had long been carried on
with a ferocity unworthy of a civilised people. Sir Robert Walpole was
the minister who gave to our Government that character of lenity which
it has since generally preserved. It was perfectly known to him that
many of his opponents had dealings with the Pretender. The lives of some
were at his mercy. He wanted neither Whig nor Tory precedents for using
his advantage unsparingly. But with a clemency to which posterity has
never done justice, he suffered himself to be thwarted, vilified, and at
last overthrown, by a party which included many men whose necks were in
his power.

That he practised corruption on a large scale, is, we think,
indisputable. But whether he deserves all the invectives which have been
uttered against him on that account may be questioned. No man ought to
be severely censured for not being beyond his age in virtue. To buy
the votes of constituents is as immoral as to buy the votes of
representatives. The candidate who gives five guineas to the freeman is
as culpable as the man who gives three hundred guineas to the member.
Yet we know that, in our own time, no man is thought wicked or
dishonourable, no man is cut, no man is black-balled, because, under
the old system of election, he was returned in the only way in which
he could be returned, for East Redford, for Liverpool, or for Stafford.
Walpole governed by corruption, because, in his time, it was impossible
to govern otherwise. Corruption was unnecessary to the Tudors, for their
Parliaments were feeble. The publicity which has of late years been
given to parliamentary proceedings has raised the standard of morality
among public men. The power of public opinion is so great that, even
before the reform of the representation, a faint suspicion that a
minister had given pecuniary gratifications to Members of Parliament in
return for their votes would have been enough to ruin him. But, during
the century which followed the Restoration, the House of Commons was
in that situation in which assemblies must be managed by corruption, or
cannot be managed at all. It was not held in awe, as in the sixteenth
century, by the throne. It was not held in awe as in the nineteenth
century, by the opinion of the people. Its constitution was
oligarchical. Its deliberations were secret. Its power in the State was
immense. The Government had every conceivable motive to offer bribes.
Many of the members, if they were not men of strict honour and probity,
had no conceivable motive to refuse what the Government offered. In the
reign of Charles the Second, accordingly, the practice of buying votes
in the House of Commons was commenced by the daring Clifford, and
carried to a great extent by the crafty and shameless Danby. The
Revolution, great and manifold as were the blessings of which it was
directly or remotely the cause, at first aggravated this evil. The
importance of the House of Commons was now greater than ever. The
prerogatives of the Crown were more strictly limited than ever; and
those associations in which, more than in its legal prerogatives, its
power had consisted, were completely broken. No prince was ever in so
helpless and distressing a situation as William the Third. The party
which defended his title was, on general grounds, disposed to curtail
his prerogative. The party which was, on general grounds, friendly to
prerogative, was adverse to his title. There was no quarter in which
both his office and his person could find favour. But while the
influence of the House of Commons in the Government was becoming
paramount, the influence of the people over the House of Commons was
declining. It mattered little in the time of Charles the First whether
that House were or were not chosen by the people; it was certain to act
for the people, because it would have been at the mercy of the Court but
for the support of the people. Now that the Court was at the mercy of
the House of Commons, those members who were not returned by popular
election had nobody to please but themselves. Even those who were
returned by popular election did not live, as now, under a constant
sense of responsibility. The constituents were not, as now, daily
apprised of the votes and speeches of their representatives. The
privileges which had in old times been indispensably necessary to the
security and efficiency of Parliaments were now superfluous. But
they were still carefully maintained, by honest legislators from
superstitious veneration, by dishonest legislators for their own selfish
ends. They had been an useful defence to the Commons during a long and