of the habits and homes of the Highlanders, might disgust a Texan ranger, or a trapper of the prairies. It could not be paralleled now out of the country of the Camanches. The rebellion of 1745 advanced these despised mountaineers to the position of formidable and hated invaders. For a short time they were a terror to the Southron; but, soon succumbing to the Saxon superiority, they were made an example and a warning. Such frightful vengeance overtook them, that they became invested with the aureole of singular misfortune.

A similar operation of the same law in our nature must be taken into the account, when we would estimate the causes which contributed to misrepresent the Revolution of 1688 before the popular mind.

Nor must we forget another and most potent contribution to those causes in the efforts which were made, by the princes of the house of Hanover and their ministers, to mitigate the ardor of those liberal sentiments, to the strength of which the Guelphs were originally indebted for their seat upon the English throne. When the dynasty of Stuart had shrunk within the robes of a solitary, imbecile, old cardinal at Rome, and the pretense of pretenders had utterly vanished, the reigning house of England began to discourage all manifestations of opinion, in which the divine right of kings was called too sharply into question. The events of the French Revolution, adroitly turned by the tories to such good purpose, that they contrived to identify the triumph of their party with the preservation of England's independence, served well the new disposition of the royal coteries, and George III. seems to have forgotten himself, and to have made other and more sensible people forget, that he had been called to his throne by the virtue of the popular voice, rather than by the sacrosanct and mysterious election of birth.

The splendid victory which popular rights won in these colonies, and the gradual development of just and natural ideas of government, which has been going on in England ever since the peace of 1815, had prepared the way for such an assertion of the truth, in regard to the events of 1688, as Mr. Macaulay had it in his mind to make.

In his first volume, Mr. Macaulay opened clearly a view of the highway

along which England advanced to the crisis of her national destiny.

England, in the middle ages, was indeed, "merry England," the most prosperous country of Europe. All foreign writers who spoke of England, in comparison with the nations of the continent, bore witness to this fact. Froissart attributes the proud and indomitable temper of the English, "the most dangerous and outrageous people in the universe," to the way in which "all sorts of people, laborers and merchants, have contrived to live without mutual war, to conduct their trade, and to do their work in peace and quiet." Comines, writing during the terrible war of the Roses, declared, "that among all the states in the world, that one in which public affairs are best regulated, and the people least given to internal violence, and the fewest buildings demolished or damaged by war, is England. In England the troubles of war fall on those who make it."

For this singular exemption from the worst horrors of the feudal civilization, England was indebted, in no small degree, to her conquest by the Norman sovereigns.

The monarchies of the continent came to unity, only after long ages of internecine war among the nobles-ages during which no monarch was found strong enough to curb his audacious vassals, and consolidate his realm.

The Norman sovereigns of England, relying upon their continental resources, were strong enough, from the beginning, to intimidate their barons, and to force the lords of the soil into a closer union with the people than existed anywhere else during the feudal ages. It was one most important consequences of this anomalous state of things, that the English aristocracy very early assumed the character of a regular political power. In the fifteenth century, when the fusion of the Norman and the Saxon races had, at last, resulted in the creation of a true English nation, the aristocracy of England was, indeed, "the most democratic, and the democracy of England the most aristocratic in Europe."

The wars of the Roses, which decimated the feudal nobility, gave still greater vigor to this special constitution of English society.

In 1451, Henry VI. summoned fiftythree peers to parliament. When Henry

VII. convoked the lords, in 1485, only twenty-nine assembled at Westminster, and, of this number, not a few were new

men.

The Tudors aspired after absolute power. But they were too sagacious not to see that the long prosperity of the English people had accustomed the nation to certain substantial rights and privileges, which could not be safely meddled with. England was willing enough to invest the sovereign who represented her with the formal attributes of plenary power; but the ambition of Henry VII., the arrogance of Henry VIII., and the vaulting spirit of Elizabeth, all alike recoiled from the first decisive intimation that the royal prerogative had been pushed further than the commonalty would bear.

To the Tudors succeeded the Stuarts. James I. was not merely a crowned bore, a pedantic button-holder, invested with the power of life and death over his victims; he was at heart a tyrant. In his native kingdom of Scotland, he had been bullied and maltreated. Pragmatic Presbyterians and passionate Catholics had treated him with equal contempt. In that then rude and fierce kingdom, Genevan republicanism had inflamed the already "perfervidum ingenium Scotorum," till the royal authority was almost purely nominal.

James came, from the midst of his overbearing preachers and his insolent nobles, into a court trained to the respectful formalities and profound obedience to which Elizabeth had educated her household. For the first time in his life, the son of the unfortunate Mary, who had before been scarcely treated like a gentleman, found himself treated like a king. The style in which Parliament addressed him, the tone adopted all about him, conspired to turn his head and to ripen his hopes of a royalty that should be royalty indeed.

He neither knew the English people sufficiently well, nor had he enough native good sense to understand the true condition of things, and though he received some pretty resolute pushes from the exalted horn of London city, he nursed his woeful delusions, and transmitted them to his son Charles. Domestic favorites, and the sight of foreign courts, completed the work which James had begun in the mind of his son.

Is it so difficult to comprehend the illusions which filled the brain of Charles

I., when he took the sceptre into his hands?

All over Europe the feudal world was disappearing, and absolute monarchies were everywhere arising from its ruins. In France, Charles had seen the absolute sovereignty which Richelieu was preparing for the heir of Louis XIII. In Spain he had seen the stately splendors of the absolute monarchy which Philip II. had built up over the liberties of a people as proud of their privileges as the people of England. His brotherin-law, the Elector Frederic, had fallen a victim in Germany to the domination of the house of Austria; and Charles, while he lamented the sorrows of his sister, could not but feel that her husband had provoked his fate by resisting what seemed the universal tendency of things and the victorious will of heaven. privileges of the English people were unwritten, vague, ill-defined. Was it not time for England to accept the new constitution of things, to follow the example of France, and Spain, and Germany? Was it not time for Charles to insist that the language of adulation, which he daily heard from the lips of prelates and of peers, of popular preachers and of orators in the commons, should be translated into facts; that the royal dignity should be elevated in England to an equality with the position it had achieved in the other states of the European family?

The

Thus Charles reasoned, and upon reasonings like these he proceeded to

act.

Had his genius been equal to the intensity of his convictions, nay, had he been a much worse man than he was -less of a gentleman and more of a Jesuit he might have attained his ends. But he was just not strong enough, and just not bad enough to succeed.

Resolute as he was, his resolution was no match for the iron will of men like Hampden and Pym; unscrupulous as he was, he was more scrupulous than Cromwell. He failed, and execrable as would have been the consequences of his success, the people of England have always felt for him the pity and the sympathy which cannot be denied to a gallant, and courtly, and melancholy figure, stricken down by superior force, and deprived at once of his dreams and of his life.

The despotism of the commonwealth was specially hateful to England, be

cause it was a religious despotism. The "merry England" which had wherewithal to eat and to drink and to dance, food enough and to spare, through the long middle ages, was in nowise a pious England. No feature is more marked in the contrast which medieval England makes with her sister nations of the continent, than this. France, Germany, Spain, harried with perpetual wars, and sunk in misery, were the strongholds of devotion; England, on the contrary, appears, from a very early period after the Conquest, to have "waxed fat and kicked," not against the doctrine, but against the discipline of the church.

Asceticism, and religious extravagances of all sorts, found small favor there. When the horrible pestilence ravaged the continent in the fourteenth century, and the extreme misery of men gave rise to strange and fantastic enthusiasms, bands of the flagellants, who traversed the cities of Italy and France, weeping aloud and scourging themselves, crossed the channel, and marched in dismal parade through the streets of London.

The comfortable citizens of the prosperous English city looked on, stared, gaped, or laughed, but were by no means to be seduced into excoriating their sleek and comely backs. The flagellants made no converts in Cheapside.

When the Cardinal Bentivoglio drew up his curious statistics of English piety, at the era of the Reformation, he had to admit, that not more than a thirteenth part of the population could be considered fervent Catholics.

The ecclesiastical, and, indeed, the civil historians of England, have taken these facts too little into account, when seeking the causes of the facility with which England followed the princes and princesses of the house of Tudor through their rapid mutations of faith.

The religious movement which, on the continent, controlled the great political changes of the sixteenth century, in England was itself the secondary, and never the primary power.

And when the small body of sectaries, who constituted the strength of the parliamentary army, in 1643, had seized the government of England, the English people were not more revolted by the spectacle of military domination than by the intolerant and insolent behavior with which their psalm-singing and

May-pole-hating masters insulted the ancient jollity and good-natured indifference of the English temper in matters of religion.

The reëstablishment of the monarchy, effected, as it was, mainly by the influence of the commonalty of London, promised to the people the restitution of the old liberties attacked by Charles I., and of the old independence insulted by Cromwell and the Puritans.

Very different was the result. The May of the Restoration was early blighted, "no summer following."

The frivolous and worthless Charles II., relying too much on the hatred which the Commonwealth had excited, allowed and encouraged abler men than himself to toil for the consummation of the work which had cost his father both the crown and the head that wore it. His more saturnine and bigoted brother undertook himself the task which fate seemed to have imposed upon his family. It is impossible to read the history of the proceedings of James II. without a feeling analogous to that which the Greeks felt in contemplating the career of an Orestes or an Edipus.

And no writer has ever described that history with such particularity and fervor, with such fullness of fatal detail, and such intensity of patriotic feeling, as Mr. Macaulay. The chapters through which he conducts James, from the bedside of his dying brother to the boat in which he embarked for France, have the pathos and the solemnity of tragedy. It is in dealing with such themes that Mr. Macaulay rises from the rhetorician into the historian; and his magnificent prose takes upon itself a majesty of movement and a passionate rhythm, which place it beside the stateliest poetry of Dryden.

With the catastrophe of 1688, and the arrival of William of Orange, the history really begins.

An era more clearly and brilliantly marked is not to be found.

Before 1688 England was an insular state, known, indeed, widely, and widely felt at times in the affairs of the continent, but known mainly as the home of a prosperous, proud people, and felt in the sudden dashes of force with which she had, from time to time, intervened in the warlike confusion of the continent. Her revenue was small, her coasts had been swept by the brooms of Van Tromp, and Dutch sailors had

rian, has nowhere so amply vindicated his claim to these titles as in his masterly discussions of the great constitutional questions which occupied the Convention, the Convocation, and the First Parliament of William's reign. It may be objected, perhaps, that sometimes, as, for instance, in his account of the differences between the parties in religion, just after the coronation of William and Mary, Mr. Macaulay indulges himself in repetitions tending to diffuseness, and adopts a tone rather parænetic than historical. But Mr. Macaulay, as we have said before, cannot help writing like an advocate-a perfectly honest advocate--and, as we think, an advocate who generally has the best of the cause, as well as of the argument, yet still like an advocate, and his repetitions are, no doubt, intentional, rather than accidental.

We set most value on the philosophical and political merits of the new volumes of Mr. Macaulay's History. But our readers must not imagine that these volumes are destitute of interest more dramatic and exciting.

William, as we have said, is his hero; and he loses no opportunity of bringing into relief the great qualities of that strong, sad, high-spirited, and far-sighted nature. It would not be easy to find a more brilliantly-contrasted pair of sketches, than he gives us of William, taciturn and indifferent at court (vol. iii., p. 40), and of the same man, gallant, cheerful, vivacious in the camp (vol. iii., p. 490).

The glimpses that we have of Mary, are very charming; and, though one is disposed to doubt whether the historian has not over-colored the picture of her domestic felicity, it is hard to quarrel with the touches of a romance so pleasing as is suggested by the story of her devotion to her lord, and of his love for her.

Marlborough is the devil of the piece, and is handled in a very scurvy fashion. It is clear that Mr. Macaulay cherishes something very like a personal hatred to the departed hero of Blenheim.

All scoundrels, indeed, fare so badly at Mr. Macaulay's hands, as almost to move our compassion. Do any of our readers remember his famous article on Barère-an article so excessively vituperative, that we never knew a tolerably candid person to rise from the perusal of it without a strong prejudice in favor of the man so savagely attacked?

An analogous feeling is excited by such vitriolic outlines as that of Melfort, and even by the pertinacity with which James II. is pursued into all the recesses of his selfishness and his folly.

Mr. Macaulay's picture of the humiliating position, and the abject conduct of James, at the court of France, after his ignominious return from Ireland, is positively pitiless.

The friends of William Penn must sound again the Quaker trumpet. Where is Hepworth Dixon? As one seemingly unconscious of all the controversy excited by his former portrait of the great philanthropist, Mr. Macaulay goes on in his third volume to speak of Penn as an acknowledged plotter, and charges him directly with advising an invasion of England by the French. Nor do we see how the charge is to be rebutted. It has yet to be proved that Mr. Macaulay has made a serious error in any statement of facts, and we advise nobody to approach such an enterprise without careful, previous investigation of the cost; for the evidence which this history affords of close and minute study is surprising. As we remarked in the outset of this article, Mr. Macaulay allows no scrap of chronicle, however slight, to be wasted. His text gives to the casual or unpracticed reader no more idea of the labor expended upon it, than one of the tapestried cartoons of Raphael affords of the number of threads woven into its beautiful harmony, and of the weary hours through which the weaver bent over his task. We open the book almost at random, and our eyes fall immediately on a curious illustration of this indefatigable industry. In the course of a very striking description of Belfast as it was in 1688, and as it now is, occurs the following sentence: "The Belfast which William entered, was a small English settlement, of about three hundred houses, commanded by a stately castle, which has long disappeared." Three or four pages further on, we find a note, which tells us, that in the British Museum there is a map of Belfast, made in 1685, so exact, that the houses may be counted.

A man who causes the houses on an old map to be counted, that he may give precision to a paragraph, is not likely to be caught napping.

The wealth of information which Macaulay has acquired from old libraries, old plays, old ballads, from visits