siderable abilities, is, under ordinary circum- | kind. He could not bear discomfort, bodily or stances, scarcely to be distinguished from the mental. His lamentations when, in the course highest and purest integrity; and yet may be of his diplomatic journeys, he was put a little perfectly compatible with laxity of principle, out his way, and forced, in the vulgar phrase, with coldness of heart, and with the most in- to rough it, are quite amusing. He talks of tense selfishness. Temple, we fear, had not riding a day or two on a bad Westphalian road, sufficient warmth and elevation of sentiment of sleeping on straw for one night, of travelling to deserve the name of a virtuous man. He in winter when the snow lay on the ground, as did not betray or oppress his country: nay, he if he had gone on an expedition to the North rendered considerable service to her; but he Pole or to the source of the Nile. This kind risked nothing for her. No temptation which of valetudinarian effeminacy, this habit of codeither the King or the Opposition could hold dling himself, appears in all parts of his conout ever induced him to come forward as the duct. He loved fame, but not with the love of supporter either of arbitrary or of factious an exalted and generous mind. He loved it as measures. But he was most careful not to give an end, not at all as a means;—as a personal offence by strenuously opposing such measures. luxury, not at all as an instrument of advantage He never put himself prominently before the to others. He scraped it together and treasured public eye, except at conjunctures when he it up with a timid and niggardly thrift; and was almost certain to gain, and could not pos- never employed the hoard in any enterprise, sibly lose ;-at conjunctures when the interest | however virtuous and honourable, in which of the state, the views of the court, and the there was hazard of losing one particle. No passions of the multitude all appeared for an wonder if such a person did little or nothing instant to coincide. By judiciously availing which deserves positive blame. But much himself of several of these rare moments, he more than this may justly be demanded of a succeeded in establishing a high character for man possessed of such abilities and placed in wisdom and patriotism. When the favourable such a situation. Had Temple been brought crisis was passed, he never risked the reputa- before Dante's infernal tribunal, he would not tion which he had won. He avoided the great have been condemned to the deeper recesses offices of state which a caution almost pusilla- of the abyss. He would not have been boiled nimous, and confined himself to quiet and se- with Dundee in the crimson pool of Bulicame, cluded departments of public business, in or hurled with Danby into the seething pitch which he could enjoy moderate but certain ad- of Malebolge, or congealed with Churchill in vantage without incurring envy. If the cir- the eternal ice of Giudecca; but he would percumstances of the country became such that haps have been placed in a dark vestibule next it was impossible to take any part in politics to the shade of that inglorious pontiff— without some danger, he retired to his Library and his Orchard; and, while the nation groaned under oppression, or resounded with tumult and with the din of civil arms, amused himself by writing Memoirs and tying up Apricots. His political career bore some resemblance to the military career of Louis XIV. Louis, lest his royal dignity should be compromised by failure, never repaired to a siege, till it had been reported to him by the most skilful officers in his service that nothing could prevent the fall of the place. When this was ascertained, the monarch, in his helmet and cuirass, appeared among the tents, held councils of war, dictated the capitulation, received the keys, and then returned to Versailles to hear his flatterers repeat that Turenne had been beaten at Mariendal, that Condé had been forced to raise the siege of Arras, and that the only warrior whose glory had never been obscured by a single check was Louis the Great! Yet Condé and Turenne will always be considered captains of a very different order from the invincible Louis; and we must own that many statesmen who have committed very great faults, appear to us to be deserving of more esteem than the faultless Temple. For in truth his faultlessness is chiefly to be ascribed to his extreme dread of all responsibility; to his determination rather to leave his country in a scrape than to run any chance of being in a scrape himself. He seems to have been averse from danger; and it must be adInitted that the dangers to which a public man was exposed, in those days of conflicting tyranny and sedition, were of the most serious

"Che fece per viltate il gran rifiuto."

Of course a man is not bound to be a politi cian any more than he is bound to be a soldier; and there are perfectly honourable ways of quitting both politics and the military profession. But neither in the one way of life, nor in the other, is any man entitled to take all the sweet and leave all the sour. A man who belongs to the army only in time of peace,— who appears at reviews in Hyde Park, escorts the sovereign with the utmost valour and fidelity to and from the House of Lords, and retires as soon as he thinks it likely that he may be ordered on an expedition-is justly thought to have disgraced himself. Some portion of the censure due to such a holiday-soldier may justly fall on the mere holiday-politician, who flinches from his duties as soon as those duties become difficult and disagreeable;-that is to say, as soon as it becomes peculiarly important that he should resolutely perform them.

But though we are far indeed from considering Temple as a perfect statesmen, though we place him below many statesmen who have committed very great errors, we cannot deny that, when compared with his contemporaries, he makes a highly respectable appearance. The reaction which followed the victory of the popular party over Charles the First, had produced a hurtful effect on the national character; and this effect was most discernible in the classes and in the places which had been most strongly excited by the recent Revolution. The deterioration was greater in London than in the country, and was greatestof all in the courtly and

feelings; yet they had not acquired a strong passion for innovation. Accustomed to see old establishments shaking, falling, lying in ruins all around them,--to live under a succession of constitutions, of which the average duration was about a twelvemonth,--they had no religious reverence for prescription ;--nothing of that frame of mind which naturally springs from the habitual contemplation of immemorial antiquity and immovable stability. Accustom

official circles. Almost all that remained of what had been good and noble in the Cavaliers and Roundheads of 1642, was now to be found in the middling orders. The principles and feelings which prompted the "Grand Remonstrance" were still strong among the sturdy yeomen, and the decent God-fearing merchants. The spirit of Derby and Capel still glowed in many sequestered manor-houses; but among those political leaders who, at the time of the Restoration, were still young, or in the vigoured, on the other hand, to see change after change of manhood, there was neither a Southampton nor a Vane, neither a Falkland nor a Hampden. That pure, fervent, and constant loyalty which, in the preceding reign, had remained unshaken on fields of disastrous battle, in foreign garrets and cellars, and at the bar of the High Court of Justice, was scarcely to be found among the rising courtiers. As little, or still less, could the new chiefs of parties lay claim to the great qualities of the statesmen who had stood at the head of the Long Parliament. Hampden, Pym, Vane, Cromwell, are discriminated from the ablest politicians of the succeeding generation, by all the strong lineaments which distinguish the men who produce revolutions from the men whom revolutions produce. The leader in a great change, the man who stirs up a reposing community, and overthrows a deeply-rooted system, may be a very depraved man; but he can scarcely be destitute of some moral qualities which extort even from enemies a reluctant admiration-fixedness of purpose, intensity of will, enthusiasm which is not the less fierce or persevering, because it is sometimes disguised under the semblance of composure, and which bears down before it the force of circumstances and the opposition of reluctant minds. These qualities, variously combined with all sorts of virtues and vices, may be found, we think, in most of the authors of great civil and religious movements,-in Cæsar, in Mohammed, in Hildebrand, in Dominic, in Luther, in Robespierre; and these qualities were found, in no scanty measure, among the chiefs of the party which opposed Charles the First. The character of the men whose minds are formed in the midst of the confusion which follows a great revolution is generally very different. Heat, the natural philosophers tell us, produces rarefaction of the air, and rarefaction of the air produces cold. So zeal makes revolutions, and revolutions make men zealous for nothing. The politicians of whom we speak, whatever may be their natural capacity or courage, are almost always characterized by a peculiar levity, a peculiar inconstancy, an easy, apathetic way of looking at the most solemn questions, a willingness to leave the direction of their course to fortune and popular opinion, a aotion that one public cause is pretty nearly as good as another, and a firm conviction that it is much better to be the hireling of the worst cause than to be a martyr to the best.

This was most strikingly the case with the English statesmen of the generation which followed the Restoration. They had neither the enthusiasm of the Cavalier, nor the enthusiasm of the Republican. They had been early emancipated from the dominion of old usages and

welcomed with eager hope and ending in disappointment,-to see shame and confusion of face follow the extravagant hopes and predic tions of rash and fanatical innovators--they had learned to look on professions of public spirit, and on schemes of reform, with distrust and contempt. They had sometimes talked the language of devoted subjects--sometimes that of ardent lovers of their country. But their secret creed seems to have been, that loyalty was one great delusion, and patriotism another. If they really entertained any predilection for the monarchical or for the popular part of the constitution.-for Episcopacy or for Presbyterianism,--that predilection was feeble and languid; and instead of overcoming, as in the times of their fathers, the dread of exile, con fiscation, and death, was rarely of proof to resist the slightest impulse of selfish ambition or of selfish fear. Such was the texture of the Presbyterianism of Lauderdale, and of the speculative republicanism of Halifax. The sense of political honour seemed to be extinct. With the great mass of mankind, the test of integrity in a public man is consistency. This test, though very defective, is perhaps the best that any, except very acute or very near observers, are capable of applying; and does undoubtedly enable the people to form an estimate of the characters of the great, which, on the whole, approximates to correctness. But during the latter part of the seventeenth century, inconsistency had necessarily ceased to be a disgrace; and a man was no more taunted with it, than he is taunted with being black at Timbuctoo. Nobody was ashamed of avowing what was common to him with the whole nation. In the short space of about seven years, the supreme power had been held by the Long Parliament, by a Council of Officers, by Barebone's Parliament, by a Council of Officers again, by a Protector according to the Instrument of Government, by a Protector according to the humble petition and advice, by the Long Parliament again, by a third Council of Officers, by the Long Parliament a third time, by the Convention, and by the king. In such times, consistency is so inconvenient to a man who affects it, and to all who are connected with him, that it ceases to be regarded as a virtue, and is considered as impracticable obstinacy and idle scrupulosity. Indeed, in such times, a good citizen may be bound in duty to serve a succession of governments. Blake did so in one profession, and Hale in another; and the conduct of both has been approved by pos terity. But it is clear that when inconsistency with respect to the most important public questions has ceased to be a reproach, incon sistency with respect to questions of minor

Importance is not likely to be regarded as shonourable. In a country in which many very honest people had, within the space of a few months, supported the government of the Protector, that of the Rump, and that of the King, a man was not likely to be ashamed of abandoning his party for a place, or of voting for a bill which he had opposed.

The public men of the times which followed the Restoration were by no means deficient in courage or ability; and some kinds of talent appear to have been developed amongst them to a remarkable-we might almost say, to a morbid and unnatural degree. Neither Theramenes in ancient, nor Talleyrand in modern times, had a finer perception of all the peculiarities of character, and of all the indications of coming change, than some of our countrymen of those days. Their power of reading things of high import, in signs which to others were invisible or unintelligible, resembled magic. But the curse of Reuben was upon them all: "Unstable as water, thou shall not excel."

ancient and honourable, had, before his time, been scarcely mentioned in our history; but which, long after his death, produced so many eminent men, and formed such distinguished alliances, that it exercised, in a regular and constitutional manner, an influence in the state scarcely inferior to that which, in widely different times, and by widely different arts, the house of Neville attained in England, and that of Douglas in Scotland. During the latter years of George II., and through the whole reign of George III., members of that widely spread and powerful connection were almost constantly at the head either of the Government. or of the Opposition. There were times when the "cousinhood," as it was once nicknamed, would of itself have furnished almost all the materials necessary for the construction of an efficient cabinet. Within the space of fifty years, three First Lords of the Treasury, three Secretaries of State, two Keepers of the Privy Seal, and four First Lords of the Admiralty were appointed from among the sons and grandsons of the Countess Temple.

struggle between the crown and the Long Parliament, he supported the popular cause. He was arrested by order of the Duke of Or mond, but regained his liberty by an exchange, repaired to England, and there sat in the House of Commons as burgess for Chichester., Heattached himself to the Presbyterian party, and was one of those moderate members who, at the close of the year 1648, voted for treating with Charles on the basis to which that prince had himself agreed, and who were, in conse quence, turned out of the House, with small ceremony, by Colonel Pride. Sir John seems, however, to have made his peace with the victorious Independents; for, in 1653, he resumed his office in Ireland.

This character is susceptible of innumerable So splendid have been the fortunes of the modifications, according to the innumerable main stock of the Temple family, continued by varieties of intellect and temper in which it female succession. William Temple, the first may be found. Men of unquiet minds and of the line who attained to any great historical violent ambition followed a fearfully eccentric eminence, was of a younger branch. His facourse-darted wildly from one extreme to ther, Sir John Temple, was Master of the Rolls another-served and betrayed all parties in in Ireland, and distinguished himself among turn-showed their unblushing foreheads al- the Privy Councillors of that kingdom by the ternately in the van of the most corrupt admi-zeal with which, at the commencement of the nistrations and the most factious oppositionswere privy to the most guilty mysteries, first of the Cabal, and then of the Rye-House Plot -abjured their religion to win their sovereign's favour, while they were secretly planning his overthrow--shrived themselves to Jesuits with letters in cipher from the Prince of Orange in their pockets-corresponded with the Hague whilst in office under James-began to correspond with St. Germains as soon as they had kissed hands for office under William. But Temple was not one of these. He was not destitute of ambition. But his was not one of those souls within which unsatisfied ambition anticipates the tortures of hell, gnaws like the worm which dieth not, and burns like the fire which is not quenched. His principle was to make sure of safety and comfort, and to let greatness come if it would. It came: he enjoyed it: and in the very first moment in which it could no longer be enjoyed without danger and vexation, he contentedly let it go. He was not exempt, we think, from the prevailing political immorality. His mind took the contagion, but took it ad modum recipientis ;-in a form so mild that an undiscerning judge might doubt whether it were indeed the same fierce pestilence that was raging all around. The malady partook of the constitutional languor of the patient. The general corruption, mitigated by his calm and unadventurous temperament, showed itself in omissions and desertions, not in positive crimes; and his inactivity, though sometimes timorous and selfish, becomes respectable when compared with the malevolent and perfidious restlessness of Shaftesbury and Sunderland.

Temple sprang from a family which, though

Sir John Temple was married to a sister of the celebrated Henry Hammond, a learned and pious divine, who took the side of the king with very conspicuous zeal during the Civil War, and was deprived of his preferment in the church after the victory of the Parliament. On account of the loss which Hammond sustained on this occasion, he has the honour of being designated, in the cant of that new brood of Oxonian sectaries who unite the worst parts of the Jesuit to the worst parts of the Orangeman, as Hammond, Presbyter, Doctor, and Confessor.

William Temple, Sir John's eldest son, was born in London, in the year 1628. He received his early education under his maternal uncle, was subsequently sent to school at BishopStortford, and, at seventeen, began to reside at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where the celebrated Cudworth was his tutor. The times were not favourable to study. The Civil War disturbed even the quiet cloisters and bowling.

many suitors as were drawn to Belmont by the fame of Portia. The most distinguished on the list was Henry Cromwell. Destitute of the capacity, the energy, the magnanimity of his illustrious father, destitute also of the meek and placid virtues of his elder brother, this young man was perhaps a more formidable rival in love than either of them would have been. Mrs. Hutchinson, speaking the senti

greens of Cambridge, produced violent revolutions in the government and discipline of the colleges, and unsettled the minds of the students. Temple forgot at Emmanuel all the little Greek which he had brought from BishopStortford, and never retrieved the loss;-a circumstance which would hardly be worth noticing but for the almost incredible fact, that fifty years later, he was so absurd as to set up his own authority against that of Bentley on ques-ments of the grave and aged, describes him as tions of Greek history and philology. He made no proficiency either in the old philosophy which still lingered in the schools of Cambridge, or in the new philosophy of which Lord Bacon was the founder. But to the end of his life he continued to speak of the former with ignorant admiration, and of the latter with equally ignorant contempt.

an "insolent fool,” and a “debauched ungodly Cavalier." These expressions probably mean that he was one who, among young and dissipated people, would pass for a fine gentleman. Dorothy was fond of dogs of larger and more formidable breed than those which lie on modern hearth-rugs; and Henry Cromwell promised that the highest functionaries at Dublin After residing at Cambridge two years, he should be set to work to procure her a fine departed without taking a degree, and set out Irish greyhound. She seems to have felt his upon his travels. He seems then to have been attentions as very flattering, though his father a lively, agreeable young man of fashion, not was then only Lord-General, and not yet Proby any means deeply read, but versed in all tector. Love, however, triumphed over ambithe superficial accomplishments of a gentle- tion, and the young lady appears never to have man, and acceptable in all polite societies. In regretted her decision; though, in a letter writpolitics he professed himself a Royalist. His ten just at the time when all England was ringopinions on religious subjects seem to have ing with the news of the violent dissolution of been such as might be expected from a young the Long Parliament, she could not refrain man of quick parts, who had received a ram- from reminding Temple, with pardonable vabling education, who had not thought deeply,nity, "how great she might have been, if she who had been disgusted by the morose austeri- had been so wise as to have taken hold of the ty of the Puritans, and who, surrounded from offer of H. C." childhood by the hubbub of conflicting sects, might easily learn to feel an impartial contempt for them all.

Nor was it only the influence of rivals that Temple had to dread. The relations of his mistress regarded him with personal dislike, On his road to France he fell in with the son and spoke of him as an unprincipled advenand daughter of Sir Peter Osborne. Sir Peter turer, without honour or religion, ready to renwas Governor of Guernsey for the king, and der services to any party for the sake of prethe young people were, like the father, warm ferment. This is, indeed, a very distorted view for the royal cause. At an inn where they of Temple's character. Yet a character, even stopped, in the Isle of Wight, the brother in the most distorted view taken of it by the amused himself with inscribing on the windows most angry and prejudiced minds, generally his opinion of the ruling powers. For this in- retains something of its outline. No caricastance of malignancy the whole party were ar- turist ever represented Mr. Pitt as a Falstaff, rested and brought before the governor. The or Mr. Fox as a skeleton; nor did any libeller sister, trusting to the tenderness which, even ever impute parsimony to Sheridan, or profuin those troubled times, scarcely any gentle- sion to Marlborougn. It must be allowed that man of any party ever failed to show where a the turn of mind which the eulogists of Terwoman was concerned, took the crime on her-ple have dignified with the appellation of phiself, and was immediately set at liberty with her fellow-travellers.

This incident, as was natural, made a deep impression on Temple. He was only twenty. Dorothy Osborne was twenty-one. She is said to have been handsome; and there remains abundant proof that she possessed an ample share of the dexterity, the vivacity, and the tenderness of her sex. Temple soon became, in the phrase of that time, her servant, and she returned his regard. But difficulties as great as ever expanded a novel to the fifth volume, opposed their wishes. When the courtship commenced, the father of the hero was sitting in the Long Parliament, the father of the heroine was holding Guernsey for King Charles. Even when the war ended, and Sir Peter Osborne returned to his seat at Chicksands, the prospects of the lovers were scarcely less gloomy. Sir John Temple had a more advantageous alliance in view for his son. Dorothy Osborne was in the mean time beseiged by as

losophical indifference, and which, however becoming it may be in an old and experienced statesman, has a somewhat ungraceful appearance in youth, might easily appear shocking to a family who were ready to fight or suffer martyrdom for their exiled king and their persecuted church. The poor girl was exceedingly hurt and irritated by these imputations on her lover, defended him warmly behind his back, and addressed to himself some very tender and anxious admonitions, mingled with assurances of her confidence in his honour and virtue. On one occasion she was most highly provoked by the way in which one of her brothers spoke of Temple: "We talked ourselves weary," she says "he renounced me, and I defied him."

Nearly seven years did this arduous wooing continue. We are not accurately informed respecting Temple's movements during that time. But he seems to have led a rambling life, sometimes on the Continent, sometimes in

He appears to have kept up a very active correspondence with his mistress. His letters are lost, but hers have been preserved; and many of them appear in these volumes. Mr. Courtenay expresses some doubt whether his readers will think him justified in inserting so large a number of these epistles. We only wish that there were twice as many. Very little indeed of the diplomatic correspondence of that generation is so well worth reading. There is a vile phrase of which bad historians are exceedingly fond-"the dignity of history." One writer is in possession of some anecdotes which would illustrate most strikingly the operation of the Mississippi scheme on the manners and morals of the Parisians. But he suppresses those anecdotes because they are too low for the dignity of history. Another is strongly tempted to mention some facts indicating the horrible state of the prisons of England two hundred years ago. But he hardly thinks that the sufferings of a dozen felons pigging together on bare bricks in a hole fifteen feet square would form a subject suited to the dignity of history. Another, from respect for the dignity of history, publishes an account of the reign of George II., without ever mentioning Whitefield's preaching in Moorfields. How should a writer, who can talk about senates, and congresses of sovereigns, and pragmatic sanctions, and ravelines, and counterscarps, and battles where ten thousand men are killed and six thousand men with fifty stands of colours and eighty guns taken, stoop to the StockExchange, to Newgate, to the theatre, to the tabernacle?

Ireland, sometimes in London. He made him- | good or evil may hereafter be produced. The self master of the French and Spanish lan- poisoning of an emperor is in one sense a far guages, and amused himself by writing Essays more serious matter than the poisoning of a and Romances-an employment which at least rat. But the poisoning of a rat may be an era served the purpose of forming his style. The in chemistry; and an emperor may Le poisoned specimen which Mr. Courtenay has preserved by such ordinary means, and with such ordiof those early compositions is by no means nary symptoms, that no scientific journal would contemptible. Indeed, there is one passage notice the occurrence. An action for a hunon Like and Dislike which could have been pro- dred thousand pounds is in one sense a more duced only by a mind habituated carefully to momentous affair than an action for fifty reflect on its own operations, and which re- pounds. But it by no means follows that the minds us of the best things in Montaigne. learned gentlemen who report the proceedings of the courts of law ought to give a fuller account of an action for a hundred thousand pounds than of an action for fifty pounds. For a cause, in which a large sum is at stake, may be important only to the particular plaintif and the particular defendant. A cause, on the other hand, in which a small sum is at stake, may establish some great principle interesting to half the families in the kingdom. The case is exactly the same with that class of subjects of which historians treat. To an Athenian, in the time of the Peloponnesian war, the result of the battle of Delium was far more important than the fate of the comedy of the "Knights." But to us the fact that the comedy of the "Knights" was brought on the Athenian stage with success is far more important than the fact that the Athenian phalanx gave way at Delium. Neither the one event nor the other has any intrinsic importance. We are in no danger of being speared by the Thebans. We are not quizzed in the "Knights." To us, the importance of both events consists in the value of the general truth which is to be learned from them. What general truths do we learn from the accounts which have come down to us of the battle of Delium? Very little more than this, that when two armies fight, it is not improbable that one of them will be very soundly beaten-a truth which it would not, we apprehend, be difficult to establish, even if all memory of the battle of Delium were lost among men. But a man who becomes acquainted with the comedy of the "Knights," and with the history of that comedy, at once feels his mind enlarged. Society is presented to him under a new aspect. He may have read and travelled much. He may have visited all the countries of Europe, and the civilized nations of the East. He may have observed the manners of many barbarous races. But here is something altogether different from every thing which he has seen either among polished men or among savages. Here is a community, politically, intellectually, and morally unlike any other community of which he has the means of forming an opinion. This is the really precious part of history,-the corn which some threshers carefully sever from the chaff, for the purpose of gathering the chaff into the garner, and flinging the corn into the fire.

Tragedy has its dignity as well as history; and how much the tragic art has owed to that lignity any man may judge who will compare the majestic Alexandrines in which the "Seigneur Oreste" and "Madame Andromaque" utter their complaints, with the chattering of the fool in "Lear," and of the nurse in "Romeo and Juliet."

That an historian should not record trifles, that he should confine himself to what is important, is perfectly true. But many writers seem never to have considered on what the historical importance of an event depends. They seem not to be aware that the importance of a fact, when that fact is considered with reference to its immediate effects, and the importance of the same fact, when that fact is considered as part of the materials for the construction of a science, are two very different things. The quantity of good or evil which a transaction produces is by no means necessarily proportioned to the quantity of light which that transaction affords as to the way in which

Thinking thus, we are glad to learn so much, and would willingly learn more, about the loves of Sir William and his mistress. In the seventeenth century, to be sure, Louis XIV. was a much more important person than Temple's sweetheart. But death and time equalize all things. Neither the great king, nor the beauty of Bedfordshire -neither the gorgeous