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cause it was a religious despotism. The "merry England " which had wherewithal to eat and to drink and to dance, food enough and to spare, through the long middle ages, was in nowise a pious England. No feature is more marked in the contrast which medieval England makes with her sister nations of the continent, than this. France, Germany, Spain, harried with perpetual wars, and sunk in misery, were the strongholds of devotion; England, on the contrary, appears, from a very early period after the Conquest, to have "waxed fat and kicked," not against the doctrine, but against the discipline of the church.

Asceticism, and religious extravagances of all sorts, found small favor there. When the horrible pestilence ravaged the continent in the fourteenth century, and the extreme misery of men gave rise to strange and fantastic enthusiasms, bands of the flagellants, who traversed the cities of Italy and France, weeping aloud and scourging themselves, crossed the channel, and marched in dismal parade through the streets of London.

The comfortable citizens of the prosperous English city looked on, stared, gaped, or laughed, but were by no means to be seduced into excoriating their sleek and comely backs. The flagellants made no converts in Cheapside.

When the Cardinal Bentivoglio drew up his curious statistics of English piety, at the era of the Reformation, he had to admit, that not more than a thirteenth part of the population could be considered fervent Catholics.

The ecclesiastical, and, indeed, the civil historians of England, have taken these facts too little into account, when seeking the causes of the facility with which England followed the princes and princesses of the house of Tudor through their rapid mutations of faith.

The religious movement which, on the continent, controlled the great political changes of the sixteenth century, in England was itself the secondary, and never the primary power.

And when the small body of sectaries, who constituted the strength of the parliamentary army, in 1643, had seized the government of England, the English people were not more revolted by the spectacle of military domination than by the intolerant and insolent behavior with which their psalm-singing and

May-pole-hating masters insulted the ancient jollity and good-natured indifference of the English temper in matters of religion.

The reëstablishment of the monarchy, effected, as it was, mainly by the influence of the commonalty of London, promised to the people the restitution of the old liberties attacked by Charles I., and of the old independence insulted by Cromwell and the Puritans.

Very different was the result. The May of the Restoration was early blighted, "no summer following."

The frivolous and worthless Charles II., relying too much on the hatred which the Commonwealth had excited, allowed and encouraged abler men than himself to toil for the consummation of the work which had cost his father both the crown and the head that wore it. His more saturnine and bigoted brother undertook himself the task which fato seemed to have imposed upon his family. It is impossible to read the history of the proceedings of James II. without a feeling analogous to that which the Greeks felt in contemplating the career of an Orestes or an Edipus.

And no writer has ever described that history with such particularity and fervor, with such fullness of fatal detail, and such intensity of patriotic feeling, as Mr. Macaulay. The chapters through which he conducts James, from the bedside of his dying brother to the boat in which he embarked for France, have the pathos and the solemnity of tragedy. It is in dealing with such themes that Mr. Macaulay rises from the rhetorician into the historian; and his magnificent prose takes upon itself a majesty of movement and a passionate rhythm, which place it beside the stateliest poetry of Dryden.

With the catastrophe of 1688, and the arrival of William of Orange, the history really begins.

An era more clearly and brilliantly marked is not to be found.

Before 1688 England was an insular state, known, indeed, widely, and widely felt at times in the affairs of the continent, but known mainly as the home of a prosperous, proud people, and felt in the sudden dashes of force with which she had, from time to time, intervened in the warlike confusion of the continent. Her revenue was small, her coasts had been swept by the brooms of Van Tromp, and Dutch sailors had

smoked audacious pipes upon the Thames, within sight of her burning dockyards, and almost within sound of London bells. Her sovereigns had condescended to be the pensioners of France, her colonies were few, feeble, and scattered, her commerce contended for life with the great marines of Holland and of Spain.

Since 1688 what a new and wonderful history has been hers!

The insular state has become the mother of liberal ideas in the Old World, and in the New; the moral power of her great example has stimulated the political and the social life of mankind into developments of which no man can foresee the result, and no force restrain the progress; her stupendous revenues have enabled her to bear lightly, not merely the expenditure of an imperial govern

ment over territories more vast than Europe, but the interest of a debt, of which the principal exceeds the wealth of the civilized world in the days of William of Orange. She has seen one mighty empire arise from her side, and pass from her control, to take its place among the great powers of the earth; while, at the moment when the folly of her court sacrificed her splendid heritage in the West, the enterprise of her chief city found for her another colossal dominion in the East, more magnificent than the realms of Alexander. Holland and Spain she has seen wither, as she waxed mighty; and she it was who broke the sword of France in the hand of one, in comparison with whom the Grand Monarque was a meek and unambitious prince. She has given names to the arts, to literature, to oratory, to war, and to freedom, which would make her fame immortal were her glorious empire resolved again into anarchy and ruin.

The Revolution of 1688 was the turning point of all this history. The expulsion of the Stuarts was the assumption by the English people of that control over their own affairs which has been the true secret of the wondrous growth and greatness of modern England, and of our own America. To describe the Revolution of 1688, therefore, its rise and its progress, to paint, with special fidelity, events which transpired during a period so pregnant with the future, and the characters of the men who, in great things as in little, helped to determine the result of the perilous enter

prise which brought the Prince of Orange to England, was the first duty of the historian who had undertaken to trace the course of the English people in the career which then opened before them. And it will not surprise the reflecting reader to find, that in the third and fourth volumes of his history, just issued, Mr. Macaulay has discussed the transactions of but little more than six years. The importance of the crisis fully justifies the extended treatment which it receives at the historian's hands. Within the first year alone, of the reign of William and Mary, England was called upon to decide the question of peace or war with France-a decision which involved a course of foreign policy entirely new, and bound up the fortunes of England with the contingencies of European politics; to settle the principles of allegiance, and the doctrine of sovereignty; to define the limits of religious toleration, and practically to remodel the establishment of the English church. Civil war in Ireland, civil war in Scotland, the reconstruction of the national system of finance, occupied, at one and the same time, the attention of William and his councilors.

It is not too much to say that, within the first two years after the accession of William, England passed through convulsions more radical than those which had shaken the state in the terrible times of the Roses, or in the great civil war.

That a prince who, though of English blood, was of foreign birth and breeding, should have come off safely, and with honor from such trials of his sagacity, his good sense and his honesty, is nothing less than extraordinary; and Mr. Macaulay has done no more than he had a right to do in erecting William into his hero. Should the great work which the historian has projected, by some untoward fate, be permitted to be carried on no further than may be necessary to give us a complete account of the reign of William III., Mr. Macaulay will have done enough for his own glory, though too little for our expectations. For though the special admirers of Mr. Macaulay, the essayist, may find the style and the subjects of that portion of William's history which lies here before us less stimulating and startling than the opening volumes of the work, we think it will finally be conceded that Mr. Macaulay, the statesman and histo

rian, has nowhere so amply vindicated his claim to these titles as in his masterly discussions of the great constitutional questions which occupied the Convention, the Convocation, and the First Parliament of William's reign. It may be objected, perhaps, that sometimes, as, for instance, in his account of the differences between the parties in religion, just after the coronation of William and Mary, Mr. Macaulay indulges himself in repetitions tending to diffuseness, and adopts a tone rather parænetic than historical. But Mr. Macaulay, as we have said before, cannot help writing like an advocate-a perfectly honest advocate-and, as we think, an advocate who generally has the best of the cause, as well as of the argument, yet still like an advocate, and his repetitions are, no doubt, intentional, rather than accidental.

We set most value on the philosophical and political merits of the new volumes of Mr. Macaulay's History. But our readers must not imagine that these volumes are destitute of interest more dramatic and exciting.

William, as we have said, is his hero; and he loses no opportunity of bringing into relief the great qualities of that strong, sad, high-spirited, and far-sighted nature. It would not be easy to find a more brilliantly-contrasted pair of sketches, than he gives us of William, taciturn and indifferent at court (vol. iii., p. 40), and of the same man, gallant, cheerful, vivacious in the camp (vol. iii., p. 490).

The glimpses that we have of Mary, are very charming; and, though one is disposed to doubt whether the historian has not over-colored the picture of her domestic felicity, it is hard to quarrel with the touches of a romance so pleasing as is suggested by the story of her devotion to her lord, and of his love for her.

Marlborough is the devil of the piece, and is handled in a very scurvy fashion. It is clear that Mr. Macaulay cherishes something very like a personal hatred to the departed hero of Blenheim.

All scoundrels, indeed, fare so badly at Mr. Macaulay's hands, as almost to move our compassion. Do any of our readers remember his famous article on Barère-an article so excessively vituperative, that we never knew a tolerably candid person to rise from the perusal of it without a strong prejudice in favor of the man so savagely attacked?

An analogous feeling is excited by such vitriolic outlines as that of Melfort, and even by the pertinacity with which James II. is pursued into all the recesses of his selfishness and his folly.

Mr. Macaulay's picture of the humiliating position, and the abject conduct of James, at the court of France, after his ignominious return from Ireland, is positively pitiless.

The friends of William Penn must sound again the Quaker trumpet. Where is Hepworth Dixon? As one seemingly unconscious of all the controversy excited by his former portrait of the great philanthropist, Mr. Macaulay goes on in his third volume to speak of Penn as an acknowledged plotter, and charges him directly with advising an invasion of England by the French. Nor do we see how the charge is to be rebutted. It has yet to be proved that Mr. Macaulay has made a serious error in any statement of facts, and we advise nobody to approach such an enterprise without careful, previous investigation of the cost; for the evidence which this history affords of close and minute study is surprising. As we remarked in the outset of this article, Mr. Macaulay allows no scrap of chronicle, however slight, to be wasted. His text gives to the casual or unpracticed reader no more idea of the labor expended upon it, than one of the tapestried cartoons of Raphael affords of the number of threads woven into its beautiful harmony, and of the weary hours through which the weaver bent over his task. We open the book almost at random, and our eyes fall immediately on a curious illustration of this indefatigable industry. In the course of a very striking description of Belfast as it was in 1688, and as it now is, occurs the following sentence: "The Belfast which William entered, was a small English settlement, of about three hundred houses, commanded by a stately castle, which has long disappeared." Three or four pages further on, we find a note, which tells us, that in the British Museum there is a map of Belfast, made in 1685, so exact, that the houses may be counted.

A man who causes the houses on an old map to be counted, that he may give precision to a paragraph, is not likely to be caught napping.

The wealth of information which Macaulay has acquired from old libraries, old plays, old ballads, from visits

to the haunts of the great, and the scenes of important actions, he has lavished upon his descriptions of the few men whose portraits, at full length, he now, for the first time, introduces into the scene. Upon the picture of Somers, whom Mr. Webster used to call the "incomparable Somers," he lays every touch with a lover's hand. In his description of Swift's "universal villain," Wharton, there is more of brilliancy, and at the same time, more humanity, than in any account we have ever read of that most consistent of profligates and of whigs. Bad as Wharton was, he could not have been a "villain," of whom it could be said with truth, "that he had never given a challenge; had never refused one; had never taken a life, and yet had never fought without having his antagonist's life at his mercy."

It is

Our readers will pardon us, if we call their special attention to the fire and feeling with which Mr. Macaulay recounts battles by sea and land. no easy thing to describe a battle well. Where Scott, the poet, failed, and Napier, the soldier, stands alone preëminent among English historians, it is no slight praise to say that Macaulay, the statesman, has been successful. The accounts of the French victory by sea, off Beachy Head, and of the long fight of La Hogue, in which England regained the trident wrested from her handsof Newton Butler, where the Saxons routed the Celts, and of Killiecrankie, where the Celts defeated the Saxons, are admirable examples at once of impartiality, and of a narrative which becomes easily impetuous without ever ceasing to be intelligible.

Nor does Macaulay excel less in the relation of great civil shows and scenes, such as the rejoicings at Paris, on the receipt of the false tidings of the death of the Prince of Orange; the entry of William into Dublin, after his victory on the Boyne; and the coronation pageantry, with which the third volume opens. One trait alone, in the last mentioned of these passages, strikes us as out of taste, and painful. The daughter of the martyred Lord Russell is introduced, with exquisite tact and feeling, as a prominent figure in the welcome given to the liberator of England; but is there not something repulsive in the touch which the historian adds, to paint

her"stern delight" at the tardy punishment of her father's murderers?

Other pictures Macaulay gives us, which demand the darkest tints upon his palette. Such are the harrowing sentences in which he describes the devastation of the Palatinate, by Duras, under the orders of Louvois, and with the sanction of Louis XIV., whose sanction, given to a villainy so black, to cruelties at once so atrocious and so useless, should alone suffice to make his memory infamous.

Such, too, are the pages that relate the hateful massacre of Glencoe-a massacre never too much to be execrated, but of any real responsibility for which, we think, with Mr. Macaulay, that William III. must be acquitted.

But it is time for us to bring these remarks to an end. Too much for the patience of our readers we may have already said too much in praise of the spirit of Mr. Macaulay's history, or too much upon the importance of the principles which he means his history to illustrate, we could not easily say.

To all men who need to understand the true theory of government, the true laws which control the condition and the growth of states, these volumes are treasuries of instruction, and of suggestion. And this necessity is laid upon all intelligent Americans. Ours is not a constitution which, having been wisely established by wise men, seventy years ago, will move onward of itself, and carry the nation with it in the path of progress and prosperity. We, like the Englishmen of 1688, must be, in a great measure, the architects of our own fortunes. The working of our government will sway with the impulses of the public heart and mind. Contingencies, unforeseen by our fathers, may-such contingencies indeed do-loom up before us, in the not distant future. When those contingencies come upon us, it will not be what was written by our fathers, but what is understood by ourselves, that will save us. And therefore we should be grateful to every writer who sets before us, as Mr. Macaulay has done, with so much spirit, and sense, and temper, the great results in the past of principles that are as permanent and immutable as the constitution and the exigencies of man.

ABU HAMOOD'S MULE: AND THE CEDARS OF LEBANON.

ROM the tails of oriental sheep (so lengthily treated in a previous paper), there is an easy transition to tales of oriental fancy. One of these usually grotesque narratives was related to the Hakeem, on the following provocation. A Syrian friend was enlarging to him, on the melancholy fact that a man who knows a great truth cannot always declare it, without incurring censure, or even persecution, from the mistaken and testy public. To support this rather antique proposition, he told the following story, which cannot be found in the Arabian Nights:

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There was once a certain kadi, named Abu Hamood, who was inordinately fond of mules. His stables were uproarious with them, and yet not a month passed, but he added some new costly specimen to his stock. He used to visit them every day, fondle and hug them all around, kiss their long silky ears, and receive their bites and kicks, like so many civilities and benedictions. In short, this passion mastered him to such a degree that he ultimately became a very wicked kadi, and would stick at no false judgment or extortion, to possess himself of a tempting piece of mule-flesh. Accordingly, the spirit of evil laid a trap for him; and the kadi fell into it. And this was

the manner of his fall:

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One day, as he walked in the streets of Bagdad-looking right and left for mules-he met a Mughrebee, of an exceedingly dark complexion. This Mughrebee was leading the finest mule that had ever been seen in the city; so beautiful, in fact, that it was like the rising sun for strength, and like the full moon for elegance. Abu Hamood stopped in front of the animal, utterly bewildered, and struck blind by its extraordinary graces. In the mean time, the man was walking the mule up and down, before the gates of the kadi's palace. At last, Abu Hamood spoke to him, and said, with a trembling voice, such was his agitation:

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that?'

O, Mughrebee, whose mule is

"It is my master's,' replied the other. 'He is a Mughrebee, like myself; but he is a prince, while I am a slave.'

"And where is thy master?' continued Abu Hamood.

"He has gone to the bazaars, to buy silks and jewels; and he bade me walk the mule up and down before this palace, until he returned.'

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O, Mughrebee!' said Abu Hamood, 'wilt thou not let me take hold of the bridle of this mule, and enjoy the exquisite pleasure of leading him a few paces? And may God reward thee for thy benignity!'

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Take it, O friend!' said the other; and I will even thank thee: I have occasion to eat; I will go to the pastry-cook's, and return in a moment.'

"Abu Hamood took the bridle, with a trembling hand, and began to lead the mule up and down, in such a state of enchantment, that an hour passed away, as if it had been a minute. His servants espied him, and rushed out, to relieve him of his strange occupation; but he drove them away, and would suffer no one to touch the bridle, beside himself. At last, he began to wonder at the Mughrebee's prolonged absence, and looked anxiously up and down the street, hoping that he had lost his way, or broken his neck, so that he might never return. In short, no Mughrebee appeared; and, after another hour-which, by reason of his anxiety, seemed to him like a century-Abu Hamood stealthily led the beautiful mule into his own court-yard. There he gave it to his chief servant, and told him to put it into the best stall, and provide it with a bed of silk, instead of straw. But the mule broke away from the servant, and followed the kadi into the saloon, stepping as noiselessly as if his feet had been shod with roses. And thus, when Abu Hamood seated himself on a divan, the mule stood before him, and affectionately put his nose into his new master's bosom, and began to eat some raisins that were secreted there. The kadi was enchanted at the animal's tameness and gentleness, and allowed him to nibble at the raisins, until he had had raisins enough. When he would eat no more, the kadi said:

"Doubtless, this poor mule is thirsty; go, and bring him some water.'

"One of the servants brought a sheraby or a narrow-necked jar of water and

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