polished sarcasm, written by Halifax, put an end | to these idle projects. One of Penn's schemes was that a law should be passed dividing the patronage of the crown into three equal parts; and that to one only of those parts members of the Church of Rome should be admitted. Even under such an arrangement, the members of the Church of Rome would have obtained near twenty times their fair portion of official appointments; and yet there is no reason to believe that even to such an arrangement the King would have consented. But, had he consented, what guaranty could he give that he would ad here to his bargain? The dilemma propounded by Halifax was unanswerable. binding on you, observe the law which now exists. If laws are not binding on you, it is idle to offer us a law as a security.'

'If laws are

"It is clear, therefore, that the point at issue was not whether secular offices should be thrown open to all sects indifferently. While James was king, it was inevitable that there should be exclusion, and the only question was, who should be excluded?-Papists or Protestants, the few or the many, a hundred thousand Englishmen or five

millions."

We look on this passage as one of very grave and lasting importance, as far as the example of those times is of moment in our own. Indeed, the principle of religious toleration actually made progress under James, as far as the merely religious element was concerned. Puritanism did by no means flame so high in England at that time, as it did this side of the border; and there really seems little reason to believe that, if the nation could have felt satisfied that neither the Church establishment, nor freedom of person and conscience would have been endangered by the repeal of the Test, there would have been any deep resistance, on religious grounds, against the admission of Roman Catholics to secular power. That very singular negotiation with the Dissenters, on the part both of James and the Church of England, which Mr. Macaulay describes with so much spirit, and the subsequent cordiality with which the Church and the Dissenters co-operated at the trial of the bishops, certainly evince far more liberality on the part of both the Episcopalian and the Dissenting clergy of that day, than many of their descendants could boast of.

Perhaps the most original and brilliant part of the whole work, is the author's description of the character, views, and opinions of King William; and his estimate of the effects of that character and those views on the immediate condition and future fortunes of England. Nothing more power

ful in writing, more discriminating in judgment, or more masterly in comprehensive analysis, is to be found in English history. Even here, Mr. Macaulay's eye for the picturesque has not failed him; and there is a singular felicity in the contrast between his character of William and that which he had drawn of James. The picture is, as far as we can judge, in no respect overdrawn or flattered; but nothing could be more strongly or happily marked than the farsighted, intellectual, energetic character of the one, when set off as a foil to the imbecility, injustice, and indecision of the other.

The account of the origin and progress of the intrigue, for such it was, which brought William to our shores, is one of the most elaborate and most valuable parts of the volumes before us. Mr. Macaulay had access to many sources of information on this subject, which collectively no other writer has ever probably enjoyed, and he has probably thrown all the light on it which it is now capable of receiving. The result of the narrative is to show how completely the destinies, not of this country only, but of Europe, hung on the will of one man-and that man not a mighty monarch, but the prince of a third-rate territory. We found in this account two things of which we had not been so distinctly aware before. The first was the object which William had in his English enterprise. The European policy of William is familiar to everybody. But we certainly never saw it so clearly explained elsewhere, how entirely subordinate the English throne was, in the mind of the Prince of Orange, to his great European schemes; or how completely he regarded it as a mere rampart constructed against the power and the encroachments of France. Our author developes this view in the most convincing manner, and it serves to explain much in William's subsequent conduct, which must otherwise appear inconsistent or unintelligible-however little gratifying the explanation may be to our national pride. It is not we confess, without some regret that we acknowledge the truth of this view of the "great and good King William." We had supposed him more of a fellow-countryman than he ever was, or wished to be. and nobly as he discharged the duties of sovereignty in the land which adopted him, his heart evidently never naturalized itself to his English home; and in his inmost soul he cursed our politics, our sports, and our climate to the last. He was, in fact, transplanted too late in life to take kindly to our

Well

soil; but he came among us with high views and lofty ends; and how these were carried out, we may safely predict has never yet been told as Mr. Macaulay will tell us in his next volume.

Indeed, the accidental combination of circumstances which placed William on the throne, was in the highest degree felicitous. They saved this nation, by their happy coincidence, from the necessity of resolving many difficult questions, in extricating which too many states and commonwealths have "found no end." He was not a conqueror, for he came by invitation. He was not a creature of the hour, for he dictated his own terms. He was not a usurper or an upstart, for his position was but a step higher, and his time a few years earlier than the strict course of succession would have made them; yet he did not continue the dynasty, and he broke once and for ever that ill-twisted cord on which depended

"The right divine of kings to govern wrong."

He was not an alien to our nation or our blood, for he was doubly connected with the royal line of England; and yet he was so thoroughly removed from the provincialisms of English party-so thoroughly European in his statesmanship and his views, that all grades of rank, and men of all shades of political opinion, felt that in welcoming him they gave no triumph to an adversary. Thus he occupied at once that position of independent and constitutional isolation of which the juncture of the times stood so much in need, and was enabled to hold the balance even between contending factions, as the arbiter of their differences, while he was the servant only of the Constitution.

All this was greatly aided by the nature of his personal ambition. He was the more gladly submitted to, and, indeed, welcomed by the nation at large, that the crown of England was not a prize at which he was too eager to grasp; and that he made it evident that, except with the good will of his future subjects, and on terms honorable to himself, he had no desire to rule over them. Nor was there any affectation in this. It would not have aided the schemes he had really at heart, to have succeeded to the tedious task of controlling a murmuring and unwilling nation, and maintaining an alien sceptre by the swords of mercenaries. That would have infused no additional strength into the great Protestant Alliance of Europe. It would, on the contrary, have proved a new source

of anxiety and weakness. Therefore it was that he would not strike the blow, until he was sure the design was ripe; and that he waited with singular sagacity till the appointed time-resisting the solicitations of too eager friends, and the lures of enticing opportunity. He had no wish for the kingdom, unless he acquired it under circumstances which should leave him leisure, while they gave him power, to use all the energies of the ancient monarchy he represented, in defense and furtherance of his great scheme of European policy.

While thus the Prince of Orange, in ascending the throne of England, had no local interests to serve, or wrongs to avenge, he saved us also from that worst result of revolutions, the dislodgment of those rude but strong corner-stones on which the foundations of the constitution were built. For, let men theorize as they may, nothing is clearer by experience than that a free constitution cannot be safely or certainly constructed on a month's or a year's warning; nor will men ever regard with the same respect, or defend with the same jealousy, the new-fledged code of yesterday, as that which is made up of customs which are entwined round our earliest recollections, and are strong in the strongest of human impulsesthe force of habit. Persons who see how ancient laws, too narrow for the growth of society, cling, nevertheless, round the old pillars of the state with resisting tenacity, and who find the path of reform far more upward and difficult than a philosopher might think it ought to be, are frequently too much inclined to despise and overlook that great engine of civil government, antiquity. On the contrary, we have learned by the fate of other countries, to look on it as our greatest good fortune, that, in our history, from its earliest dawn, we have never been compelled to rebuild a shattered or uprooted constitution. Its growth has been spontaneous. It has from time to time cast off its superfluous or contracted limbs, as crustaceous animals do their shells, by its own internal energy; not only without its identity being impaired, but with the nation's old ancestral pride in the fabric, deepened and enlarged under each renovating effort. And though no doubt the gravitating principle which keeps ancient customs firmly fixed on our English soil, does also retard the chariot-wheels of improvement, and compels many measures of reformation, simple and plain in themselves, to convulse and agitate the whole civil system before they

Nothing could have been more happily expressed by anticipation, to characterize the critique which made its appearance on the same day with these just and honorable

sentences.

Let us take him ad aperturam.

It is said, that in the anecdote of Francis, who was executed for the murder of Dangerfield, Mr. Macaulay was not justified in calling Francis a Tory gentleman. But Mr. Macaulay was very well justified in doing so inasmuch as Francis was a Tory, as the critic himself might have known. Among the authorities at the bottom of the page, from which, probably, the critic learned all he knows of the matter, Mr. Macaulay refers to Francis's dying speech in the State Trials, and to the Observator, July 29, 1685. Now both of these authorities sufficiently prove that Francis was a Tory. In his dying speech he prays that James may vanquish and overcome all his enemies, "which I am glad to have seen so much prospect of," and also," I cannot but regret my being made a sacrifice to the Faction, who I am satisfied are the only people who will rejoice at my ruin." No one acquainted with the language and feelings of the time these words were spoken, will doubt that Mr. Macaulay's character was perfectly just. But to make the matter certain, L'Estrange, in the "Observator" above-mentioned speaks of Francis as "a true friend and servant of the government," terms which he never could or would have applied to any but a "Tory gentleman," -which Mr. Macaulay was quite correct in calling him; and which, after all, is not the most opprobrious epithet which Mr. Macaulay could apply to one of that school of politicians.

Again, Mr. Macaulay is accused of misrepresenting what Francis said about his wife, when he attributes to him the sentiment, that "had she been inclined to break her marriage Vow, she would at least have selected a Tory and a Churchman for her paramour." The critic says that Francis simply stated that his wife was so well-born, that had she

and why, if it did not plainly mean this, did the critic stoop to pervert the passage?

The critic spends a page on a lecture to Mr. Macaulay for quoting in a foot-note, one passage, and no more, of Lord Peterborough's character of Dangerfield-a task he might have spared himself had he attended to, or been fair enough to state, the object of the author in that quotation. Mr. Macaulay had been speaking of the probability of Francis having been jealous of Dangerfield's intimacy with his wife, and chose Lord Peterborough, who notoriously hated him, as an unexceptionable authority, for his being a likely enough object of such a jealousy. Lord Peterborough was not, as the critic absurdly says, cited as a witness to his character-but simply to his appearance and address, having described him as "a young man who appeared under a decent figure, a serious behavior, and with words that did not seem to proceed from a common understanding." Lord Peterborough was a good, because naturally an unwilling, witness to his personal advantages -he would have been the worst to prove him a villian, which, notwithstanding, he unquestionably was, and which Mr. Macaulay, in the text, had most abundantly shown him to have been.

Again, the critic triumphantly asks, "what it can signify, in the history of the reign of Charles II., that a writer, sixty years after the Revolution," describes how the houses in Bath were furnished? He would have his reader imagine, what he could hardly help knowing very well was not the case, "that the writer, sixty years after the Revolution," was writing on the state of Bath at that time. The book is "Wood's History of Bath," published indeed in 1749, but in which the author describes what Bath was many years before, and speaks of the recollections of his youth. No better authority one would think could be found of what happened "sixty years since" than the evidence of a man who remembered it.

The reviewer makes an absurd mistake and convicts himself of gross ignorance, about the two Echards, or Eachards. "Our readers," he announces rather pompously,