John De Witt, a civil commissioner in 1667 and murdered in 1672, with Witte Corneliszoon de With, the celebrated admiral, killed in action in 1658. On the other hand, his account of the Peace of the Pyrenees and the inception of the war of the Spanish succession, short as it is, is extremely interesting and suggestive; the more so as the story is very generally put on one side by English readers, who like to consider the Spanish question' as brought to light by the keen vision of William III., at the time of negotiating the 'first' Partition Treaty, and to condemn the action of the French king as unscrupulous and wholly unjustifiable.

But in history, as in moral philosophy, an excellent maxim in judging of the conduct of an adversary is 'Put yourself in his 'place'; and so considered, the action of the French king throughout was correct, natural and necessary. Correct, for it is the duty of a king or minister to do all that he honestly can for the advantage of his country; natural, for the material advantage of France very clearly lay in the direction aimed at, and necessary, for a nation is bound to maintain and defend its just rights. How these necessities and these rights arose, Acton has very well told. The expansion of France on the north and east followed, as a matter of course, on the break-up of Germany and the decay of Spain. To secure the inheritance of the Spanish monarchy and its boundless dominions was an object for skilful diplomacy. Philip IV. had no son; and his daughter, Maria Theresa, was his heir. As early as 1646 Mazarin resolved that 'his master should marry the Infanta, and that Spain and the Indies, Naples and the Milanese, and the remnant of the possessions of Charles the Bold should be attached to the 'Crown of France.' Will any country gentleman, who has conceived the idea of his son and heir marrying the heiress of an adjoining estate, say that the project was not justifiable, was not praiseworthy? When the time came and the treaty was being negotiated, it was the young Louis that objected. He was in love with Marie Mancini, the cardinal's niece. Let Mazarin's self-denial expiate some of his many offences. He sent Marie away, and in spite of the young King's tears and entreaties, the marriage, as projected, was gone through with. But

6

"The independence of Spain, the unity of the Spanish Empire, were too grand a thing to be an item in the dowry of a bride. She

*It is so printed. The editors have considered Acton's rough notes too sacred, and have not amended even his obvious slips in grammar.

[the Infanta] was compelled to renounce her rights, which were transferred to her sister. The renunciation was conditional; it was to depend on the payment, in due time, of the Infanta's fortune. As the payment was not made, the French regarded the surrender as null and void-[would not any court of law have so considered it ?]— and the interest at stake, the most splendid inheritance on earth, was one that could not be given up without a conflict. From the moment of the marriage, the main object of French policy was to make the succession secure, by negotiation or force, and to take every advantage otherwise of Spanish weakness.'

The immediate object, however, failed. Philip died in 1665, but he had married again and left a baby son, who succeeded as Charles II. It was about this Charles's last illness and death, in 1700, that there raged the storm which burst in the War of the Spanish Succession. But the importance of the question was known and considered-in France and Austria as in Spainthrough all the intervening years, thirty years or more before it attracted any general notice in England.

It was the French King who first raised the contention, by his utterly illegal and unconstitutional claim, made in professed accordance with the 'Law of Devolution.' Spain, which was being plundered, was quite unable to defend herself; Holland, only a few months before the ally of France, was powerless; Austria, who ought to have interposed, was cleverly bought off by a Partition Treaty, which, as it led to nothing but Austria's inglorious neutrality, has been passed by with scant notice, and may almost be called unknown. Of course, it was really the 'first.' Philip, by his will, had provided for what seemed the very probable case of his infant son's death, and left his entire dominions to the Emperor, Leopold. The Spaniards, believing that, by the renunciation of his wife at her marriage, Louis was excluded, were content that the monarchy should remain in the Hapsburg family; but

'The Austrian knew perfectly well that France would not be bound by an act which belonged not to the world of real politics, but to the waste-paper basket. Therefore, when France proposed an eventual partition, it seemed important to obtain a more serious and more binding contract than the Queen's renunciation. The conditions were not unfavourable to the imperial interest.'

They were, in fact, very much the same as those of the 'second' -really the third-Partition Treaty which, in 1700, Leopold refused to accept. In 1667, the still exhausted state of the Empire rendered a renewal of the war undesirable; and on the part of France, Acton is, no doubt, correct in saying: 'The treaty was not meant to govern the future, but the present.

'It helped to keep the Emperor tranquil during the spoliation ' of his Spanish kinsman.'

And then he offers what seems a happy suggestion, if only we could accept it. 'Within a week of the first treaty of partition,' he says, 'Sir William Temple concluded the Triple 'Alliance.' If the sentence has any meaning, it is that this was De Witt's answer to the treaty between France and Austria. It is quite impossible to say that De Witt had no knowledge of the negotiations that were going on-sufficient, at any rate, to lead him to suspect the fact and to desire to counterbalance it; but, according to the strict letter, Acton's phrase is curiously inaccurate. The Partition Treaty was signed on January 28, 1668; the Triple Alliance, five days earlier, January 23.* For the time being, however, the Triple Alliance accomplished all that it was intended to do, though the treason of the English King was presently to bring its work to nought. This is the secret Treaty of Dover, which, as Acton has done, we pass over with the bare mention.

6

As the date gets farther away from the period which Acton had made his own, the errors in detail become more and more frequent, and more puzzling. What, for instance, can we make of the statement that, presumably in 1757, Frederick required 'that the army in English pay, which was to defend Hanover, ' and thus to cover his right flank, should be commanded by the 'Duke of Cumberland'? As it stands, it is incredible; but as no reference is given, we can only suggest that, by a slip of the pen, Acton wrote 'Frederick' when he meant George,' though to cover his right flank' renders that interpretation doubtful. We may, however, be quite sure that Frederick no more made such a requisition than did Pitt, at or about the same time— date not given-' arm one hundred and forty-eight ships of the ' line and fifty frigates, with which he swept the Atlantic. As our effective ships of the line in 1756 numbered no more than seventyfive, of which several were in the East Indies, and many were never outside the home ports, the number one hundred and fortyeight is not only impossible but absurd.† Other instances there are in which an error is implied rather than explicitly stated; and such are, no doubt, often due to the nature of the manuscript, and to the author's having, most unfortunately for us, been unable to revise it or to correct the proofs; largely also to the form of the lectures, by which the endeavour to say a great deal in a very

* Henri Vast, 'Les Grands Traités du Règne de Louis XIV.,' ii. 6 n., 9.

† Beatson, Naval and Military Memoirs,' iii. note 76.

limited space necessitated the use of expressions which seem dogmatic and certainly convey a false meaning.

The last chapter, which ought to be an important one, a chapter on the American Revolution, has, unfortunately, very little value. Lord Acton appears to have taken the story, ready-made, from the writings of Burke and his fellows in the anti-English agitation, and to have deemed it unnecessary to study it by the light of recent research. The old traditional notion is now given up by all American writers of credit, and will soon, it is to be hoped, be eliminated from their school books. It is greatly to be deplored that Acton, without careful inquiry, should thus have yielded to the fascination of Burke's style and have added his own reputation to the weight of Burke's name.

It is so manifestly impossible to give even a sketch of the history of England, of Western Europe, and of the United States in the compass of nineteen, lectures, that it does not tell of sound judgement in Acton to have attempted it. He had a subject peculiarly his own; he had a message to deliver to students and to advanced scholars; and he had the opportunity. The opportunity was neglected; the message was left undelivered; and in its stead we have these lectures, which tell of the well-read and cultivated man of letters rather than of the exact student. There is but little in them-in the later lectures more especiallywhich marks a familiar grasp of the story of the time. The comments of such a man will always be interesting; they will often be suggestive; but when based, as these very commonly are, on an imperfect knowledge or an inaccurate understanding of the determining facts, they have not, they cannot have any authority.

Foocy

ART. II. PEASANT STUDIES IN FRENCH FICTION.

1. La Mare au Diable. Par GEORGE SAND. Paris, 1851. 2. Les Paysans. Par H. DE BALZAC. Paris, 1845.

3. L'Ensorcelée. Par BARBEY D'AUREVILLY. Paris, 1854.

4. Un Cœur Simple. (Trois Contes.) Par GUSTAVE FLAUBERT. Paris, 1877.

5. La Fille de Ferme. ('La Maison Tellier.') Par GUY DE MAUPASSANT. Paris, 1881.

6. La Fortune des Rougon. Par ÉMILE ZOLA. Paris, 1871. 7. La Terre qui Meurt. Par RENÉ BAZIN. Paris, 1900.

[And other Works.]

ARCADIAN peasants, the porcelain figurines of the eighteenth century, berger and bergère of tinted ivory, in their greenroom setting of well-watered meadow and shady woodland; the gentle shepherd with crook and panpipe, the shepherdess with white-fleeced flock and beribboned distaff, 'Robin et 'Marion,' breathed their last when modern fiction supplanted the old lyric travesties of village and rural life. Inanimate effigies too far removed from reality even to counterfeit nature, they were swept away like faded paper flowers, and relegated to the dusty indignities of unremembered shelves where the muse dear to one generation of readers is, according to time-honoured custom, consigned by the next. Their doom was a foregone conclusion; the root of stability, truth to a living model, was lacking. The aim of the pastoralists had been to present that aspect, and only that aspect, of rusticity which they imagined could be endued with romance or invested with-as they conceived of poetry-poetic glamour. Their method was to engraft mental preconceptions of beauty and grace upon things as they are. They created with adventitious adornings a type whose refinement and charm were an artificial response to an artificial æstheticism of taste, and their process was based upon the assumption that it is the office of art to superimpose poetry on nature. They left it to their successors to enunciate the converse doctrine: that it is the function of the artist to draw poetry from nature and to elicit from existing actualities the poetry they enclose and emanate. 'Dégager l'idéal du ' réel' became the dictum of the new schoolmen, who in their turn were destined to view the advent of a later creed when a total divorce was effected between the ideal of beauty and the presentment of truth.