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At length oppression put off its most horrible he would have dissolved the Parliament, and form, and took a milder aspect. The penal imprisoned the most popular members He laws against dissenters were abolished. But would have called another Parliament. He exclusions and disabilities still remained. would have given some vague and delusive These exclusions and disabilities, after having promises of relief in return for subsidies. generated the most fearful discontents, after having rendered all government in one part of the kingdom impossible, after having brought the state to the very brink of ruin, have, in our times, been removed; but, though removed, have left behind them a rankling which may last for many years. It is melancholy to think with what ease Elizabeth might have united all the conflicting sects under the shelter of the same impartial laws and the same paternal throne; and thus have placed the nation in the same situation, as far as the rights of conscience are concerned, in which we at length stand, after all the heart-burnings, the persecutions, the conspiracies, the seditions, the revolutions, the judicial murders, the civil wars, of ten generations.

When entreated to fulfil his promises, he would have again dissolved the Parliament, and again imprisoned his leading opponents. The country would have become more agi tated than before. The next House of Commons would have been more unmanageable than that which preceded it. The tyrant would have agreed to all that the nation demanded. He would have solemnly ratified an act abolishing monopolies forever. He would have received a large supply in return for this concession; and within half a year new pa tents, more oppressive than those which had been cancelled, would have been issued by scores. Such was the policy which brought the heir of a long line of kings, in early youth the darling of his countrymen, to a prison and a scaffold.

Elizabeth, before the House of Commons could address her, took out of their mouths the words which they were about to utter in the name of the nation. Her promises went be

close upon her promise. She did not treat the nation as an adverse party; as a party which had an interest opposed to hers; as a party to which she was to grant as few advantages as possible, and from which she was to extort as much money as possible. Her benefits were given, not sold; and when once given, they were not withdrawn. She gave them, too, with a frankness, an effusion of heart, a princely dignity, a motherly tenderness, which enhanced their value. They were received by the sturdy country gentleman, who had come up to Westminster full of resentment, with tears of joy and shouts of God save the Queen. Charles the First gave up half the prerogatives of his crown to the Commons; and the Commons sent him in return the Grand Remonstrance.

This is the dark side of her character. Yet she surely was a great woman. Of all the sovereigns who exercised a power which was seemingly absolute, but which in fact depended for support on the love and confidence of their subjects, she was by far the most illus-yond their desires. Her performance followed trious. It has often been alleged, as an excuse for the misgovernment of her successors, that they only followed her example;-that precedents might be found in the transactions of her reign for persecuting the Puritans, for levying money without the sanction of the House of Commons, for confining men without bringing them to trial, for interfering with the liberty of parliamentary debate. All this may be true. But it is no good plea for her successors, and for this plain reason, that they were her successors. She governed one generation, they governed another; and between the two generations there was almost as little in common as between the people of two different countries. It was not by looking at the particular measures which Elizabeth had adopted, but by looking at the great general principles of her government, that those who followed her were likely to learn the art of managing untractable subjects. If, instead of searching the records of her reign for precedents which might seem to vindicate the mutilation of Prynne and the imprisonment of Eliot, the Stuarts had attempted to discover the fundamental rules which guided her conduct in all her dealings with her people, they would have perceived that their policy was then most unlike to hers when, to a superficial We had intended to say something concerning observer, it would have seemed most to resem- the dexterous Walsingham, the impetuous Oxble hers. Firm, haughty, sometimes unjust and ford, the elegant Sackville, the all-accomplishcruel in her proceedings towards individuals ed Sidney; concerning Essex, the ornament of or towards small parties, she avoided with the court and of the camp, the model of chivalcare, or retracted with speed, every measure ry, the munificent patron of genius, whom great which seemed likely to alienate the great mass virtues, great courage, great talents, the favour of the people. She gained more honour and of his sovereign, the love of his countrymenmore love by the manner in which she repair- all that seemed to insure a happy and glorious ed her errors, than she would have gained by life, led to an early and an ignominious death⚫ Dever committing errors. If such a man as concerning Raleigh, the soldier, the sailor, the Chanes the First had been in her place when scholar, the courtier, the orator, the poet, the whole nation was crying out against the historian, the philosopher. sometimes reviewmonopolies, he would have refused all redress:ing the queen's guards sometimes givine

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We had intended to say something concerning that illustrious group of which Elizabeth is the central figure-that group which the last of the bards saw in vision from the top of Snowdon, encircling the Virgin Queen

"Many a baron bold,

And gorgeous dames, and statesmen old
In bearded majesty."

chase to a Spanish galleon, then answering the chiefs of the country party in the House of Commons, then again murmuring one of his sweet love-songs too near the ears of her highness's maids of honour, and soon after poring over the Talmud, or collating Polybius with Livy. We had intended also to say something concerning the literature of that splendid period, and especially concerning those two in comparable men, the Prince of Poets and the

Prince of Philosophers, who have made the Elizabethan age a more glorious and important era in the history of the human mind, than the age of Pericles, of Augustus, or of Leo. But subjects so vast require a space far larger than we can at present afford. We therefore stop here, fearing that, if we proceed, our article may swell to a bulk exceeding that of all other reviews, as much as Doctor Nares's book exceeds the bulk of all other histories.

DUMONT'S RECOLLECTIONS OF MIRABEAU."

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1832.]

great original thinker, and to a sincere and ardent friend of the human race. If a few weaknesses were mingled with his eminent virtues, if a few errors insinuated themselves among the many valuable truths which he taught, this is assuredly no time for noticing those weaknesses or those errors in an unkind or sarcastic spirit. A great man has gone from among us, full of years, of good works, and of deserved honours. In some of the highest departments in which the human intellect can exert itself, he has not left his equal or his

This is a very amusing and a very instructive book; but, even if it were less amusing and less instructive, it would still be interesting as a relic of a wise and virtuous man. M. Dumont was one of those persons, the care of whose fame belongs in an especial manner to mankind, for he was one of those persons who have, for the sake of mankind, neglected the care of their own fame. In his walk through life there was no obtrusiveness, no pushing, no elbowing, none of the little arts which bring forward little men. With every right to the head of the board, he took the low-second behind him. From his contemporaries est room, and well deserved to be greeted withFriend, go up higher. Though no man was more capable of achieving for himself a separate and independent renown, he attached himself to others; he laboured to raise their fame; he was content to receive, as his share of the reward, the mere overflowings which redounded from the full measure of their glory. Not that he was of a servile and idolatrous habit of mind; not that he was one of the tribe of Boswells, those literary Gibeonites, born to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to the higher intellectual castes. Possessed of talents and acquirements which made him great, he wished only to be useful. In the prime of manhood, at the very time of life at which ambitious men are most ambitious, he was not solicitous to proclaim that he furnished information, arguments, and eloquence to Mirabeau. In his later years he was perfectly willing that his renown should merge in that of Mr. Bentham.

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he has had, according to the usual lot, more or less than justice. He has had blind flatterers and blind detractors; flatterers who could see nothing but perfection in his style, detractors who could see nothing but nonsense in his matter. He will now have judges. Posterity will pronounce its calm and impartial decision, and that decision will, we firmly believe, place in the same rank with Galileo and with Locke the man who found jurisprudence a gibberish and left it a science. Never was there a lite rary partnership so fortunate as that of Mr Bentham and M. Dumont. The raw material which Mr. Bentham furnished was most precious, but it was unmarketable. He was, assuredly, at once a great logician and a great rhetorician. But the effect of his logic was injured by a vicious arrangement, and the effect of his rhetoric by a vicious style. His mind was vigorous, comprehensive, subtile, fertile of arguments, fertile of illustrations. But he spoke in an unknown tongue; and, that the congregation might be edified, it was neces sary that some brother having the gift of interpretation should expound the invaluable jargon. His oracles were of high import, but they were traced on leaves and flung loose to the wind. So negligent was he of the arts of selection, distribution, and compression, that to persons who formed their judgment of him from. hi works in their undigested state, he seemed to be the least systematic of all philosophers. The truth is, that his opinions formed a system which, whether sound or unsound, is more exact, more entire, and more consistent with itself than any other. Yet, to superficial rea

ers of his works in their original form, and indeed to all readers of those works who did not bring great industry and great acuteness to the study, he seemed to be a man of a quick and ingenious but ill-regulated mind, who saw truth only by glimpses, who threw out many striking hints, but who had never thought of combining his doctrines in one harmonious whole.

M. Dumont was admirably qualified to supply what was wanting in Mr. Bentham. In the qualities in which the French writers surpass those of all other nations-neatness, clearness, precision, condensation-he surpassed all French writers. If M. Dumont had never been born, Mr. Bentham would still have been a very great man. But he would have been great to himself alone. The fertility of his mind would have resembled the fertility of those vast American wildernesses, in which blossoms and decays a rich but unprofitable vegetation, "wherewith the reaper filleth not his hand, neither he that bindeth up the sheaves his bosom." It would have been with his discoveries as it has been with the "Century of Inventions." His speculations on laws would have been of no more practical use than Lord Worcester's speculations on steam-engines. Some generations hence, perhaps, when legislation has found its Watt, an antiquary might have published to the world the curious fact, that in the reign of George the Third there had been a man called Bentham, who had given hints of many discoveries made since his time, and who had really, for his age, taken a most philosophical view of the principles of jurisprudence.

surprised and mortified to learn, that he speaks with very little respect of the French Revolu tion, and of its authors. Some zealous Tories have naturally expressed great satisfaction at finding their doctrines, in some respects, confirmed by the testimony of an unwilling wit ness. The date of the work, we think, explains every thing. If it had been written ten years earlier, or twenty years later, it would have been very different from what it is. It was written, neither during the first excitement of the Revolution, nor at that later period, when the practical good produced by the Revolution had become manifest to the most prejudiced observers; but in those wretched times, when the enthusiasm had abated, and the solid advantages were not yet fully seen. It was writ ten in the year 1799, a year in which the most sanguine friend of liberty might well feel some misgivings as to the effects of what the National Assembly had done. The evils which attend every great change had been severely felt. The benefit was still to come. The price, a heavy price, had been paid. The thing pur chased had not yet been delivered. Europe was swarming with French exiles. The fleets and armies of the second coalition were viciorious. Within France, the reign of terror was over; but the reign of law had not commenced. There had been, indeed, during three or four years, a written constitution, by which rights were defined, and checks provided. But these rights had been repeatedly violated, and those checks had proved utterly inefficient. laws which had been framed to secure the dis tinct authority of the executive magistrates and of the legislative assemblies-the freedom Many persons have attempted to interpret of election, the freedom of debate, the freedom between this powerful mind and the public. of the press, the personal freedom of citizens But, in our opinion, M. Dumont alone has suc--were a dead letter. The ordinary mode in ceeded. It is remarkable that, in foreign countries, where Mr. Bentham's works are known solely through the medium of the French version, his merit is almost universally acknowledged. Even those who are most decidedly opposed to his political opinions, the very chiefs of the Holy Alliance, have publicly testified their respect for him. In England, on the contrary, many persons who certainly entertained no prejudice against him on political grounds, were long in the habit of mentioning him contemptuously. Indeed, what was said of Bacon's philosophy may be said of Bentham's. It was of little repute among us till judgments in its favour came from beyond sea, and convinced us, to our shame, that we had been abusing and laughing at one of the greatest men of the age.

M. Dumont might easily have found employments more gratifying to personal vanity, than that of arranging works not his own. But he could have found no employment more useful or more truly honourable. The book before us, hastily written as it is, contains abundant proof, if proof were needed. that he did not become an editor because he wanted the talents which would have made him eminent as a writer.

Persons who hold democratical opinions, and who have been accustomed to consider M. Dumont as one of their party, have been

The

which the republic was governed, was by coups d'état. On one occasion, the legislative councils were placed under military restraint by the directors. Then again, directors were deposed by the legislative councils. Elections were set aside by the executive authority. Ship loads of writers and speakers were sent, without a legal trial, to die of fever in Guiana. France, in short, was in that state in which revolutions, effected by violence, almost always leave a nation. The habit of obedience had been lost. The spell of proscription had been broken. Those associations on which, far more than on any arguments about property and order, the authority of magistrates rests, had completely passed away. The power of the government consisted merely in the physi cal force which it could bring to its support. Moral force it had none. It was itself a government sprung from a recent convulsion. Its own fundamental maxim was, that rebellion might be justifiable. Its own existence proved that rebellion might be successful. The people had been accustomed, during several years, to offer resistance to the constituted authorities ca the slightest provocation, and to see the con stituted authorities yield to that resistance The whole political world was "without form and void"-an incessant whirl of hosule atoms, which every moment formed some new combination. The only man who could fix the

agitated elements of society in a stable form, | perceive where their error lay. We can perwas following a wild vision of glory and em-ceive that the evil was temporary, and the pire through the Syrian deserts. The time was not yet come, when

"Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar stood ruled;"

when, out of the chaos into which the old society had been resolved, were to rise a new dynasty, a new peerage, a new church, and a new code.

good durable. But we cannot be sure, that, if our lot had been cast in their times, we should not, like them, have been discouraged and disgusted; that we should not, like them, have seen, in that great victory of the French people, only insanity and crime.

It is curious to observe how some men are applauded, and others reviled, for merely being what all their neighbours are, for merely going The dying words of Madame Roland, "Oh positively down the stream of events, for merely Liberty! how many crimes are committed in representing the opinions and passions of a thy name!" were at that time echoed by many whole generation. The friends of popular of the most upright and benevolent of mankind. government ordinarily speak with extreme M. Guizot has, in one of his admirable pam- severity of Mr. Pita, and with respect and tenphlets, happily and justly described M. Lainé derness of Mr. Canning. Yet the whole difas "an honest and liberal man, discouraged by ference, we suspect, consisted merely in this: the Revolution." This description, at the time that Mr. Pitt died in 1806, and Mr. Canning in when M. Dumont's Memoirs were written, 1827. During the years which were common would have applied to almost every honest and to the public life of both, Mr. Canning was liberal man in Europe; and would, beyond all assuredly not a more illiberal statesman than doubt, have applied to M. Dumont himself. To his patron. The truth is, that Mr. Pitt began that fanatical worship of the all-wise and all- his political life at the end of the American good people, which had been common a few War, when the nation was suffering from the years before, had succeeded an uneasy suspi- effects of corruption. He closed it in the midst cion that the follies and vices of the people of the calamities produced by the French Rewould frustrate all attempts to serve them. volution, when the nation was strongly imThe wild and joyous exultation with which the pressed with the horrors of anarchy. He meeting of the States-General and the fall of changed, undoubtedly. In his youth he had the Bastile had been hailed, had passed away. brought in reform bills. In his manhood he In its place was dejection, and a gloomy dis- brought in gagging bills. But the change, trust of specious appearances. The philoso- though lamentable, was, in our opinion, perphers and philanthropists had reigned. And fectly natural, and might have been perfectwhat had their reign produced? Philosophy ly honest. He changed with the great body had brought with it mummeries as absurd as of his countrymen. Mr. Canning, on the any which had been practised by the most su other hand, entered into public life when perstitious zealot of the darkest age. Philan-Europe was in dread of the Jacobins. thropy had brought with it crimes as horrible as the massacre of St. Bartholomew. This was the emancipation of the human mind. These were the fruits of the great victory of reason over prejudice. France had rejected the faith of Pascal and Descartes as a nursery fable, that a courtesan might be her idol, and a madman her priest. She had asserted her freedom against Louis, that she might bow down before Robespierre. For a time men thought, that all the boasted wisdom of the eighteenth century was folly; and that those hopes of great political and social ameliorations, which had been cherished by Voltaire and Cordorcet, were utterly delusive.

He

closed his public life when Europe was suffering under the tyranny of the Holy Alliance. He, too, changed with the nation. As the crimes of the Jacobins had turned the master into something very like a Tory, the events which followed the Congress of Vienna turned the pupil into something very like a Whig.

So much are men the creatures of circumstances. We see that, if M. Dumont had died in 1799, he would have died, to use the new cant word, a decided "conservative." If Mr. Pitt had lived to 1832, it is our firm belief that he would have been a decided reformer.

The judgment passed by M. Dumont in this work on the French Revolution must be taken with considerable allowances. It resembles a criticism on a play, of which only the first act has been performed, or on a building from which the scaffolding has not yet been taken down. We have no doubt, that if the excellent author had revised these memoirs thirty years after the time at which they were written, he would have seen reason to omit a few passages, and to add many qualifications and ex

Under the influence of these feelings, M. Dumont has gone so far as to say, that the writings of Mr. Burke on the French Revolution, though disfigured by exaggeration, and though containing doctrines subversive of all public liberty, had been, on the whole, justified by events, and had probably saved Europe from great disasters. That such a man as the friend and fellow-labourer of Mr. Bentham, should have expressed such an opinion, is a circum-planations. stance which well deserves the consideration He would not probably have been incline of uncharitable politicians. These Memoirs to retract the censures, just, though sever have not convinced us that the French Revo- which he has passed on the ignorance, the prelution was not a great blessing to mankind. sumption, and the pedantry of the National As But they have convinced us that very great sembly. But he would have admitted that, in indulgence is due to those, who, while the Re-spite of those faults, perhaps even by reason volution was actually taking place, regarded it of those faults, that Assembly had conferred with unmixed aversion and horror. We can inestimable benefits on mankind. It is clear

senseless temerity. Demolition is undoubtedly a vulgar task; the highest glory of the statesman is to construct. But there is a time for every thing, a time to set up, and a time to pull down. The talents of revolutionary leaders, and those of the legislator, have equally their use and their season. It is the natural, the almost universal law, that the age of insurrec. tions and proscriptions shall precede the age of good government, of temperate liberty, and liberal order.

that among the French of that day, political kind than was produced by their fierce and knowledge was absolutely in its infancy. It would indeed have been strange if it had attained maturity in the time of censors, of lettres-de-cachet, and of beds of justice. The electors did not know how to elect. The representatives did not know how to deliberate. M. Dumont taught the constituent body of Montreuil how to perform their functions, and found them apt to learn. He afterwards tried in concert with Mirabeau, to instruct the National Assembly in that admirable system of parliamentary tactics which has been long And how should it be otherwise? It is not established in the English House of Commons, in swaddling-bands that we learn to waik. It and which has made the House of Commons, is not in the dark that we learn to distinguish in spite of all the defects in its composition, colours. It is not under oppression that we the best and fairest debating society in the learn how to use freedom. The ordinary world. But these accomplished legislators, sophism by which misrule is defended is, though quite as ignorant as the mob of Mon- when truly stated, this: The people must contreuil, proved much less docile, and cried out tinue in slavery, because slavery has genethat they did not want to go to school to the rated in them all the vices of slaves. Because English. Their debates consisted of endless they are ignorant, they must remain under a successions of trashy pamphlets, all beginning power which has made and which keeps them with something about the original compact of ignorant. Because they have been made ferosociety, man in the hunting state, and other cious by misgovernment, they must be missuch foolery. They sometimes diversified and governed forever. If the system under which enlivened these long readings by a little riot- they live were so mild and liberal, that under ing. They bawled; they hooted; they shook its operation they had become humane and their fists. They kept no order among them- enlightened, it would be safe to venture on a selves. They were insulted with impunity by change. But as this system has destroyed the crowd which filled their galleries. They morality, and prevented the development of gave long and solemn consideration to trifles. the intellect; as it has turned men who might, They hurried through the most important re- under different training, have formed a virtu solutions with fearful expedition. They wast-ous and happy community, into savage and ed months in quibbling about the words of that false and childish Declaration of Rights on which they professed to found their new constitution, and which was at irreconcilable variance with every clause of that constitution. They annihilated in a single night privileges, many of which partook of the nature of property, and ought therefore to have been most delicately handled.

They are called the Constituent Assembly. Never was a name less appropriate. They were not constituent, but the very reverse of constituent. They constituted nothing that stood, or that deserved to last. They had not, and they could not possibly have, the information or the habits of mind which are necessary for the framing of that most exquisite of all machines, a government. The metaphysical cant with which they prefaced their constitution has long been the scoff of all parties. Their constitution itself, that constitution which they described as absolutely perfect, and to which they predicted immortality, disappeared in a few months, and left no trace behind it. They were great only in the work of destruc tion.

The glory of the National Assembly is this, that they were in truth, what Mr. Burke called them in austere irony, the ablest architects of ruin that ever the world saw. They were utterly incompetent to perform any work which required a discriminating eye and a skilful hand. But the work which was then to be done was a work of devastation. They had to deal with abuses so horrible and so deeply Icuted, that the highest political wisdom could scarcely have produced greater good to man

stupid wild beasts, therefore it ought to last for. ever. The English Revolution, it is said, was truly a glorious revolution. Practical evils were redressed; no excesses were committed; no sweeping confiscations took place; the authority of the laws was scarcely for a moment suspended; the fullest and freest discussion was tolerated in Parliament; the nation show. ed by the calm and temperate manner in which it asserted its liberty, that it was fit to enjoy liberty. The French Revolution was, on the other hand, the most horrible event recorded in history, all madness and wickedness, absurdity in theory, and atrocity in practice. What folly and injustice in the revolutionary laws! What grotesque affectation in the revolutionary ceremonies! What fanaticism! What licentiousness! What cruelty! Anacharsis Clootz and Marat, feasts of the Supreme Being, and marriages of the Loire, trees of liberty, and heads dancing on pikes-the whole forms a kind of infernal farce, made up of every thing ridiculous and every thing frightful. This it is to give freedom to those who have neither wisdom nor virtue. It is not only by bad men interested in the defence of abuses, that arguments like these have been urged against all schemes of political improvement. Some of the highest and purest of hu man beings conceived such scorn and aver sion for the follies and crimes of the French Revolution, that they recanted, in the moment of triumph, those liberal opinions to which they had clung in defiance of persecution And if we inquire why it was that they began to doubt whether liberty were a blessing, we shall find that it was only because events had

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