caster's Schools. As we would have our descendants judge us, so ought we to judge our fathers. In order to form a correct estimate of their merits, we ought to place ourselves in their situation-to put out of our minds, for a time, all that knowledge which they, however eager in the pursuit of truth, could not have, and which we, however negligent we may have been, could not help having. It was not merely difficult, but absolutely impossible, for the best and greatest of men, two hundred years ago, to be what a very commonplace person in our days may easily be, and, indeed, must necessarily be. But it is too much that the benefactors of mankind, after having been reviled by the dunces of their own generation for going too far, are to be reviled by the dunces of the next generation for not going far enough.

remains because they fell in the breach, and did not live to penetrate to the citadel.

Now here we have a book written by a man who is a very bad specimen of the English of the nineteenth century, a man who knows nothing but what it is a scandal not to know. And if we were to judge by the self-compla cent pity with which he speaks of the great statesmen and philosophers of a former age, we should guess that he was the author of the most original and important inventions in political science. Yet not so:-for men who are able to make discoveries are generally disposed to make allowances. Men who are eagerly pressing forward in pursuit of truth are grateful to every one who has cleared an inch of the way for them. It is, for the most part, the man below mediocrity, the man who has just capacity enough to pick up and repeat the commonplaces which are fashionable in his own time,-it is he, we say, who looks with disdain on the very intellects to which it is owing that these commonplaces are not still considered as startling paradoxes or damnable heresies. The writer is just the man who, if he had lived in the seventeenth century, would have devoutly believed that the Papists burned London,-who would have swallowed the whole of Oates's story about the forty thousand soldiers disguised as pilgrims, who were to meet in Gallicia, and sail thence to invade England,-who would have carried a Protestant flail under his coat,-and who would have been furious if the story of the warming pan had been questioned. It is quite natural that such a man should speak with contempt of the great reformers of that time, because they did not know some things which he never would have known, but for the salutary effects of their exertions. The men to whom we owe it that we have the House of Commons are sneered at because they did not suffer the de bates of the House to be published. The authors of the Toleration Act are treated as bigots, because they did not go the whole length of Catholic emancipation. Just so we have heard a baby, mounted on the shoulders of its father, cry out, "How much taller I am than papa!"

The truth lies between two absurd extremes. On one side is the bigot who pleads the wisdom of our ancestors as a reason for not doing what they, in our place, would be the first to do, who opposes the Reform Bill because Lord Somers did not see the necessity of parliamentary reform,-who would have opposed the Revolution because Ridley and Cranmer professed boundless submission to the royal prerogative,—and who would have opposed the Reformation because the Fitzwalters and Marischals, whose seals are set to the Great Charter, were devoted adherents to the Church of Rome. On the other side is the conceited sciolist who speaks with scorn of the Great Charter, because it did not reform the church; of the Reformation, because it did not limit the prerogative; and of the Revolution, because it did not purify the House of Commons. The former of these errors we have often combated, and shall always be ready to combat; the latter, though rapidly spreading, has not, we think, yet come under our notice. The former error bears directly on practical questions, and obstructs useful reforms. It may, therefore, seem to be, and probably is, the more mischievous of the two. But the latter is equally absurd; it is at least equally symptomatic of a shallow understanding and an anamiable temper; and, if it should ever become general, it will, we are satisfied, pro- This gentleman can never want matter for duce very prejudicial effects. Its tendency is pride, if he finds it so easily. He may boast to deprive the benefactors of mankind of their of an indisputable superiority to all the greathonest fame, and to put the best and the worst est men of all past ages. He can read and men of past times on the same level. The au- write. Homer did not know a letter. He has thor of a great reformation is almost always been taught that the earth goes round the sun. unpopular in his own age. He generally Archimedes held that the sun went round the passes his life in disquiet and danger. It is earth. He is aware that there is a place called therefore for the interest of the human race New Holland. Columbus and Gama went to that the memory of such men should be had in their graves in ignorance of the fact. He has reverence, and that they should be supported heard of the Georgium Sidus. Newton was against the scorn and hatred of their contem-ignorant of the existence of such a planet. He poraries, by the hope of leaving a great and imperishable name. To go on the forlorn hope of truth is a service of peril: who will undertake it, if it be not also a service of honour? It is easy enough, after the ramparts are carried, to find men to plant the flag on the highest tower. The difficulty is to find men who are ready to go first into the breach; and it would be bad policy indeed to insult their VOL. III-38

is acquainted with the use of gunpowder. Hannibal and Cæsar won their victories with sword and spear. We submit, however, that is not the way in which men are to be esti mated. We submit that a wooden spoon of our day would not be justified in calling Gai leo and Napier blockheads, because they never heard of the differenti il calculus. We submit that Caxton's press in Westminster Abbey,

rude as it is, ought to be looked at with quite as much respect as the best constructed machinery that ever, in our time, impressed the clearest type on the finest paper. Sydenham first discovered that the cool regimen succeeded best in cases of small-pox. By this discovery he saved the lives of hundreds of thousands; and we venerate his memory for it, though he never heard of inoculation. Lady Mary Montague brought inoculation into use; and we respect her for it, though she never heard of vaccination. Jenner introduced vaccination; we admire him for it, and we shall continue to admire him for it, although some still safer and more agreeable preservative should be discovered. It is thus that we ought to judge of the events and the men of other times. They were behind us. It could not be otherwise. But the question with respect to them is not where they were, but which way they were going. Were their faces set in the right or wrong direction? Were they in the front or in the rear of their generation? Did they exert themselves to help onward the great movement of the human race, or to stop it? This is not charity, but simple justice and common sense. It is the fundamental law of the world in which we live that truth shall grow, first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. A person who complains of the men of 1688 for not having been men of 1835, might just as well complain of projectiles for describing a parabola, or of quicksilver for being heavier than water.

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

ances for the state of political science and political morality in former ages. In the work before us, Sir James Mackintosh speaks with just respect of the Whigs of the Revolution, while he never fails to condemn the conduct of that party towards the members of the Church of Rome. His doctrines are the libe ral and benevolent doctrines of the nineteenth century. But he never forgets that the men whom he is describing were men of the seventeenth century.

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

The history of England is emphatically the history of progress. It is the history of a constant movement of the public mind which produced a constant change in the institutions of a great society. We see that society, at the beginning of the twelfth century, in a state more miserable than the state in which the most degraded nations of the east now are. We see it subjected to the tyranny of a handful of armed foreigners. We see a strong distinction of caste separating the victorious Norman from the vanquished Saxon. We see the great body of the population in a state of personal slavery. We see the most debasing and cruel superstition exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and benevolent minds. We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance, and the studious few engaged in acquiring what did not deserve the name of knowledge. In the course of seven centuries this wretched and In this respect, two historians of our time degraded race have become the greatest and may be proposed as models, Sir James Mack- most highly civilized people that ever the world intosh and Mr. Mill. Differing in most things, saw,-have spread their dominion over every in this they closely resemble each other. Sir quarter of the globe,-have scattered the seeds James is lenient-Mr. Mill is severe. But of mighty empires and republics over vast neither of them ever omits, in the apportioning continents of which no din intimation had of praise and censure, to make ample allow-ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo,—have created

We said that the history of England is the history of progress, and, when we take a comprehensive view of it, it is so. But when ex

a maritime power which would annihilate in a | we call the attention of our readers to the quarter of an hour the natives of Tyre, Athens, causes and to the consequences of that great Carthage, Venice, and Genoa together,-have event. carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, every thing that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfec-amined in small separate portions, it may with tion which our ancestors would have thought more propriety be called a history of actions magical,-have produced a literature abound- and reactions. We have often thought that the ing with works not inferior to the noblest which motion of the public mind in our country reGreece has bequeathed to us,-have discovered sembles that of the sea when the tide is rising. the laws which regulate the motions of the Each successive wave rushes forward, breaks, heavenly bodies, have speculated with ex- and rolls back; but the great flood is steadily quisite subtlety on the operations of the human coming in. A person who looked on the waters mind,-have been the acknowledged leaders only for a moment might fancy that they were of the human race in the career of political retiring, or that they obeyed no fixed law, but improvement. The history of England is the were rushing capriciously to and fro. But history of this great change in the moral, intel- when he keeps his eye on them for a quarter lectual, and physical state of the inhabitants of an hour, and sees one sea-mark disappear of our own island. There is much amusing after another, it is impossible for him to doubt and instructive episodical matter; but this is of the general direction in which the ocean is the main action. To us, we will own, nothing moved. Just such has been the course of is so interesting and delightful as to contem- events in England. In the history of the naplate the steps by which the England of the tional mind, which is, in truth, the history of Domesday Book,-the England of the Curfew the nation, we must carefully distinguish that and the Forest Laws,-the England of crusa- recoil which regularly follows every advance ders, monks, schoolmen, astrologers, serfs, out- from a great general ebb. If we take short inlaws, became the England which we know tervals-if we compare 1640 and 1660, 1680 and love, the classic ground of liberty and and 1685, 1708 and 1712, 1782 and 1794,-we philosophy, the school of all knowledge, the find a retrogression. But if we take centuries, mart of all trade. The Charter of Henry-if, for example, we compare 1794 with 1660, Beauclerk,-the Great Charter,-the first as- or with 1685,-we cannot doubt in which disembling of the House of Commons,—the ex-rection society is proceeding.

action of personal slavery,-the separation The interval which elapsed between the Refrom the See of Rome,-the Petition of Right, storation and the Revolution, naturally divides -the Habeas Corpus Act,-the Revolution,-itself into three periods. The first extends the establishment of the liberty of unlicensed from 1660 to 1679, the second from 1679 to printing, the abolition of religious disabilities, 1681, the third from 1681 to 1688. -the reform of the representative system,-all In 1660 the whole nation was mad with loyal these seem to us to be the successive stages excitement. If we had to choose a lot from of one great revolution; nor can we compre- among all the multitude of those which men hend any one of these memorable events uu- have drawn since the beginning of the world, less we look at it in connection with those we would select that of Charles the Second on which preceded and with those which followed the day of his return. He was in a situation it. Each of those great and ever-memorable in which the dictates of ambition coincided struggles,-Saxon against Norman,-Villein with those of benevolence, in which it was against Lord,-Protestant against Papist,- easier to be virtuous than to be wicked, to be Roundhead against Cavalier,-Dissenter loved than to be hated, to earn pure and im against Churchman,-Manchester against Old Sarum, was, in its own order and season, a struggle on the result of which were staked the dearest interests of the human race; and every man who in the contests which, in his time, divided our country, distinguished himself on the right side, is entitled to our gratitude and respect.

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

perishable glory than to become infamous. For once the road of goodness was a smooth descent, He had done nothing to merit the affection of his people. But they had paid him in advance without measure. Elizabeth, after the rout of the Armada, or after the abolition of monopolies, had not excited a thousandth part of the enthusiasm with which the young exile was welcomed home. He was not, like Louis the Eighteenth, imposed on his subjects by foreign conquerors; nor did he, like Louis the Eighteenth, come back to a country which had undergone a complete change. The house of Bourbon was placed in Paris as a trophy of the victory of the European confederation. Their return was inseparably associated in the public mind with the cession of extensive pro vinces, with the payment of an immense tribute, with the devastation of flourishing depart ments, with the occupation of the kingdom by hostile armies, with the emptiness of those niches in which the gods of Athens and Rome had been the objects of a new idolatry, with

the nakedness of those walls on which the ourselves. Our great interna questions had Transfiguration had shone with light as glorious never been mixed up with the still greater as that which overhung Mount Tabor. They question of national independence. The policame back to a land in which they could re- tical doctrines of the Roundheads were not, cognise nothing. The seven sleepers of the like those of the French philosophers, doctrines legend, who closed their eyes when the Pagans of universal application. Our ancestors, for were persecuting the Christians, and woke the most part, took their stand not on a general when the Christians were persecuting each theory, but on the particular constitation of the other, did not find themselves in a world more realm. They asserted the rights, not of men, completely new to them. Twenty years had but of Englishmen. Their doctrines, there done the work of twenty generations. Events fore, were not contagious, and, had it been had come thick. Men had lived fast. The old otherwise, no neighbouring country was then institutions and the old feelings had been torn susceptible of the contagion. The language up by the roots. There was a new church in which our discussions were generally confounded and endowed by the usurper; a new ducted was scarcely known even to a single nobility, whose titles were taken from fields of man of letters out of the islands. Our local battle, disastrous to the ancient line; a new situation rendered it almost impossible that chivalry, whose crosses had been won by ex- we should make great conquests on the Contiploits which had seemed likely to make the nent. The kings of Europe had, therefore, no banishment of the emigrants perpetual. A reason to fear that their subjects would follow new code was administered by a new magis- the example of the English Puritans. They tracy. A new body of proprietors held the soil looked with indifference, perhaps with compla by a new tenure. The most ancient local dis- cency, on the death of the monarch and the tinctions had been effaced. The most familiar abolition of the monarchy. Clarendon comnames had become obsolete. There was no plains bitterly of their apathy. But we believe longer a Normandy, or a Burgundy, a Brittany, that this apathy was of the greatest service to or a Guienne. The France of Louis the Six- the royal cause. If a French or Spanish at my teenth had passed away as completely as one had invaded England, and if that army had of the Preadamite worlds. Its fossil remains been cut to pieces, as we have no doubt it might now and then excite curiosity. But it would have been, on the first day on which it was as impossible to put life into the old insti- came face to face with the soldiers of Preston tutions as to animate the skeletons which are and Dunbar,-with Colonel Fight-the-goodimbedded in the depths of primeval strata. It Fight, and Captain Smite-them-hip-and-thigh, was as absurd to think that France could be again placed under the ancient system, as that our globe could be overrun by mammoths. The revolution in the laws, and in the form of government, was but an outward sign of that mightier revolution which had taken place in the heart and brain of the people, and which affected every transaction of life,-trading, farming, studying, marrying, and giving in marriage. The French whom the emigrant prince had to govern were no more like the French of his youth, than the French of his youth were like the French of the Jaqueri. He came back to a people who knew not him nor his house, to a people to whom the Bourbon was no more than a Carlovingian or a Mero-treat her with contempt. Thus Charles came vingian. He might substitute the white flag for the tri-colour; he might put lilies in the place of bees; he might order the initials of the emperor to be carefully effaced. But he could turn his eyes nowhere without meeting some object which reminded him that he was a stranger in the place of his fathers. He returned to a country in which even the passing traveller is every moment reminded that there has lately been a great dissolution and reconstruction of the social system. To win the nearts of a people under such circumstances would have been no easy task even for Henry the Fourth.

In the English Revolution the case was altogather different. Charles was not imposed on his countrymen, but sought by them. His restoration was not attended by any circumstance which could inflict a wound on their national pride Insulated by our geographical position, insulated by our character, we had fought out our quarrel, and effected our reconciliation among

the house of Cromwell would probably now have been reigning in England. The nation would have forgotten all the misdeeds of the man who had cleared the soil of foreign invaders.

Happily for Charles, no European state, even when at war with the Commonwealth, chose to bind up its cause with that of the wanderers who were playing in the garrets of Paris and Cologne at being princes and chancellors. Under the administration of Cromwell, England was more respected and dreaded than any power in Christendom; and, even under the ephemeral government which fol lowed his death, no foreign state ventured to

back, not as a mediator between a people and a victorious enemy, but as a mediator between internal factions. He was heir to the conquests and to the influence of the able usurper who had excluded him.

The old government of England, as it had been far milder than the old government of France, had been far less violently and completely subverted. The old institutions had been spared, or imperfectly eradicated. The laws had undergone little alteration. The tenures of the soil were still to be learned from Littleton and Coke. The Great Charter was mentioned with as much reverence in the Parliaments of the Commonwealth as in those of any earlier or of any later age. A new Confession of Faith and a new ritual had been introduced into the church. But the bulk of the ecclesiastical property still remained. The col leges still held their estates. The parson still received his tithes. The Lords had, at a crisis of great excitement, been excluded by military

and it was in consequence unduly exalted. From the day when Charles the First became a prisoner, had commenced a reaction in favour of his person and of his office. From the day when the axe fell on his neck before the windows of his palace, that reaction became

violence from their House; but they retained their titles and an ample share of public veneration. When a nobleman made his appearance in the House of Commons, he was received with ceremonious respect. Those few Peers who consented to assist at the inauguration of the Protector were placed next to him-rapid and violent. At the Restoration it had self, and the most honourable offices of the day were assigned to them. We learn from the debates of Richard's Parliament how strong a hold the old aristocracy had on the affections of the people. One member of the House of Commons went so far as to say, that unless their lordships were peaceably restored, the country might soon be convulsed by a war of the barons. There was indeed at that time no great party hostile to the Upper House.

attained such a point that it could go no further. The people were ready to place at the mercy of their sovereign all their most an cient and precious rights. The most servile doctrines were eagerly avowed. The most moderate and constitutional opposition was condemned. Resistance was spoken of with more horror than any crime which a human being can commit. The Commons were more eager than the king himself to avenge the wrongs of the royal house; more desirous than the bishops themselves to restore the church; more ready to give money than the ministers to ask for it. They abrogated some of the best laws passed in the first session of the Long Parliament-laws which Falkland had sup ported, and which Hyde had not opposed. 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 excitemeat, 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 their knees brim. ming 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 rotting 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.

There was nothing exclusive in the constitution of that body. It was regularly recruited from among the most distinguished of the country gentlemen, the lawyers, and the clergy. The most powerful nobles of the century which preceded the civil war, the Duke of Somerset, the Duke of Northumberland, Lord Sudley, the Earl of Leicester, Lord Burleigh, the Earl of Salisbury, the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Strafford, had all been commoners, and had all raised themselves, by courtly arts or by parliamentary talents, not merely to seats in the House of Lords, but to the first influence in that assembly. Nor had the general conduct of the Peers been such as to make them unpopular. They had not, indeed, in opposing arbitrary measures, shown so much eagerness and pertinacity as the Commons. But still they had opposed those measures. They had, at the beginning of the discontents, a common interest with the people. If Charles had succeeded in his scheme of governing without Parliaments, the consequence of the Peers would have been grievously diminished. If he had been able to raise taxes by his own authority, the estates of the Peers would have been as much at his mercy as those of the merchants or the farmers. If he had obtained the power of imprisoning his subjects at his pleasure, a peer ran far greater risk of incurring the royal displeasure, and of being accommodated with apartments in the Tower, than any city trader or country squire. Accordingly, Charles found that the Great Council of Peers which he convoked at York would do nothing for him. In the most useful reforms which were made during the first session of the Long Parliament, the Peers concurred heartily with the Lower House; and a large and powerful minority of the English nobles stood by the popular side through the first years of the war. At Edgehill, Newbury, Marston, and Naseby, Such was England in 1660. In 1679 the the army of the Houses was cor.manded by whole face of things had changed. At the members of the aristocracy. It was not for- former of those epochs twenty years of com gotten that a peer had imitated the example of motion had made the majority of the people Hampden in refusing the payment of the ship-ready to buy repose at any price. At the latter money, or that a peer had been among the six epoch, twenty years of misgovernment had members of the legislature whom Charles illegally impeached.

Thus the old constitution of England was without difficulty re-established; and of all the parts of the old constitution the monarchical part was, at the time, dearest to the body of the people. It had been injudiciously depressed,

made the saine 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 merel♥