distinguished himself as the most brilliant and effective. His collected essays, on subjects drawn from English history, would cover the most exciting and important portion of his country's annals.

He discussed the magnificent reign of Elizabeth in his panegyric of Burleigh and his prosecution of Bacon. From John Hampden and Milton, he passed to Dryden, and Sir William Temple; from Walpole to Chatham, and from Clive to Warren Hastings.

Meanwhile, he had labored at the oar, while the ship of state was plunging and reeling through the great tempest of 1830. Returned to Parliament for a borough distinguished among the rotten for utter rottenness, he had won, by his maiden speech, a place in the front ranks of the reformers. The city of Leeds had rewarded his devotion to the good cause by electing him to a more honorable representation; and his party had proved their sense of his importance, by giving him a position in the Indian government, which insured his future independence. On his return from his eastern post of honor and of profit, Edinburgh had welcomed him to her political graces; and Lord Melbourne had confided the war-office to his care. And of all the wealth of experience and learning which he had acquired in this crowded and active career, Mr. Macaulay was completely master.

His most prominent intellectual quality is a certain decision and clearness of mind, which enables him to discern at once the availability of every fact which comes in his way.

No woman is a better economist than he; he finds a use for every rag and scrap of chronicle, however unpromising in less gifted eyes; and his quickness of perception is admirably seconded by executive faculties the most prompt and vigorous.

We wish we could add that those faculties, in their turn, always exhibited the salutary control of yet higher powers. But Mr. Macaulay's mind furnishes us rather with the image of a splendid despotism than with that of a well-ordered, constitutional government. He goes forth into the field of rhetoric, conquering and to conquer, and too often disdains alike the humdrum counsels of impartiality and the chastening suggestions of taste. Splendid and flattering as his success has been, it would have been not less brilliant, and cer

tainly would have given fairer promise of enduring worth, had his great work been distinguished from his lesser essays by a more convincing calmness of tone, and by subtler felicities of state

ment.

Macaulay's conversation, Sidney Smith used to say, lacked only one thing to make it perfectly delightful: "a few splendid flashes of silence." How often has this pregnant and witty commentary recurred to our minds, as we passed on from gorgeousness to gorgeousness, from passionate eulogy to angry vituperation, along the sounding sentences of the historian.

Between the political philosophy of Hume and that of Macaulay, no comparison can be instituted; for the living historian surpasses his predecessor as much in the extent of his views as in the abundance of his resources. But Macaulay, with all his eloquence (perhaps, indeed, because of all his eloquence), cannot hope to keep so high a place among the classic writers of the English language as must be accorded to Hume. Exuberant, vehement, glowing, picturesque, the style of Macaulay wearies sooner with its flaming antithesis than does the style of Hume, with its elegant composure. Macaulay, in fact, always writes like a candidate who has an election to carry; Hume, like a gentleman, addressing gentlemen. And though (as in this instance) the candidate may happen to be of our own party, and the principles he advocates our own most cherished convictions, it is still quite impossible for us to prefer declamation to force, gesticulation to expression, denunciation to satire, or the racking rhythmus of an ejaculatory style to the easy and natural movement of sentences, which follow each other rather like the waves of a stream, than like explosions of musketry.

But while we are convinced that the final verdict of criticism will not assign to Mr. Macaulay's history that rank in the literature of his country to which the ambition of the author aspires, we are also inclined to the belief that the faults themselves of his style, by contributing to the present popularity of his work, have rendered good service to the cause which he has most at heart.

For this glory, at least, will forever be conceded to Mr. Macaulay-that he was the first writer of acknowledged popularity and power who told the

story of the English Revolution in the spirit of liberty, and of true political wisdom.

Hume, who carried his history no further than the fall of James II., was by no means so unfair to the agents in that great event as he is usually supposed to have been. He had no love to spare for liberal politicians as such, nor had he any great faith in the virtue of public men; but he was by no means a blind worshiper of rank and royalty, and Macaulay himself can add nothing to the concise sentence in which Hume sums up the achievements of the Prince of Orange; "he saved his own country from ruin; he restored the liberties of these kingdoms; he supported the general independence of Europe."

But Hume was a Scotchman, and, with all his philosophy, one of the proudest of men.

As a Scotchman, he had suffered constant mortification in English society; and he shared the aversion of William III. for "the uncourtly humors of the English." The Stuarts were of his own race; and we have his own words for it, that "it is not altogether without example, that a man may be guided by national prejudices who has ever been little biased by private and personal friendship."

Moreover, the Stuarts were unfortunate, and we have evidence enough in Hume's treatment of the captious, irritating Rousseau (were such evidences elsewhere wanting), that those who suffered, whether by their own fault or at the hand of fortune, must always have engaged his interest.

By whatever motives influenced, it is certain that the mind of Hume had conceived very slighting notions of the men and the objects of the Revolution of 1688, and that he had no conception of the gigantic importance to England and the world of that great era.

Sir Walter Scott, who, next to Hume, has wielded the strongest influence in forming the historical opinions and sympathies of the living generation, was a still more dangerous guide.

What

Hume was not, Scott was-a worshiper of pomps and pedigrees. He delighted to believe himself the representative of a great race, and every real representative of a great race was sanctified in his eyes.

His large, and warm, and generous heart sympathized profoundly, too, VOL. VII.-17

with the gallant gentlemen and fair women who had suffered so much of old in the defense of the idols which he still revered, and the calamities of the cavaliers lent an additional holiness to the chrism of the Stuart kings.

His genius led us all captive for years: and it would at this day be no difficult thing to find many an ardent, high spirited American boy, who hates the Puritans with the hatred of a Peveril of the Peak, and sighs like a Babington or a Douglas, over the sorrows of the beautiful Mary.

Fascinated by the spell of these powerful writers, the public sympathies have been more than naturally inclined towards the royal house that fell, and, in its fall, carried down the evil genius of Britain. Even more than naturally, we say, for it was natural that, even without the aid of a Hume or a Scott, the popular feeling should be enlisted with something like tenderness in behalf of a family so steadily unfortunate. The heart of the people is not always grateful, even to the Nemesis active in their own defence.

Men and races, conspicuous for their miserable fate, will always command at least as much of compassion as of condemnation. Let us not rashly quarrel with the ordinance by which heaven has established this necessity in the nature of man. Of testimonies to its existence, history is full, and we know none more striking than is afforded by the story of the Highlanders, as Mr. Macaulay himself has told it in the first of the two new volumes which he has just given to the world, after six years of patient preparation on his part, and impatient expectation on the part of the public. In the seventeenth century the Highlanders were regarded by the Saxons as The citizens of Edinburgh savages. held the race in equal abhorrence with the citizens of London. The ancestors of the poet who painted such fair pictures of Ellen of Loch Lomond, skimming the silver surface of the waves in her slim shallop, would have been sickened at the sight of Roderick Dhu, the cattle thief, and his barelegged barbarian daughter.

Of the Highland princes, with their bards and their orators and their guards, less was known in the capital of Britain than of the Indian kings of America, or the khans of Tartary.

The sketch which Macaulay gives us

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. The 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?

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