The Press. — London, England, 1855-12-29 00:00:00

U 44 view as Macaulay of the degrading absurdity of the non jurors' cause. Law is admitted by Mr. Macaulay himself to have been a sound reasoner, and that he did not live till a later date makes no difference as regards 1)r. Johnson's opinion ; while Collier is ad- Initted by Mr. Macaulay to have been a man of eminent abilities and a great master of rhetoric. Sherlock, too, for a time warmly sup ported the non-jurors' view ; so that Mr. Macaulay, by his own admissions, is hardly justified in that low estimate of the reasoning power of the non-jurors and the absurdity of their cause which he so confidently affirms, and he gains very little by his citation of John son's authority to support him. When Mr. Macaulay has to defend William fur keeping his own countrymen about him in .high offices of State, he represents the charac ter of our public men as at the lowest point oft degradation : Here and there, lost in that ignoble crowd, was to be found a man of true integrity and public spirit. Yet even such a man could not live long in such society without much risk that the strictness of his principles would be relaxed, and the delicacy of his sense of right and wrong impaired. It was unjust to blame a prince, surrounded by flatterers and traitors, for wishing to keep near him four or live servants whom he knew by proof to be faithful even to death.—iii. 60. Turning forty pages back, we do not find that the account given of William's first Ministry supports this general condemnation of the public men of the time. .flalifax was Speaker of the Lords and Privy Seal, and— Our Revolution, as far as it can be said to bear the cha racter of any single mind, assuredly bears the character of the large yet cautious mind of Halifax.—iii. 17. Nottingham was one of the Secretaries of State, aud— Even Burnet, who at a later period felt a strong anti pathy to Nottingham, owned, in some memoirs written soon after the Revolution, that the King had judged well, and that the influence of the Tory Secretary, honestly exerted in support of the new sovereigns, had saved England from great calamities.—iii. 19. Sir John Lowther, who sat at the Admiralty Board, was— - An honest and very moderate Tory, who in fortune and parliamentary interest was among the first of the English gentry.—iii. 20. Godolphin, on whom the chief business of the Treasury devolved— Taciturn, clearminded, laborious, inoffensive, zealous for no Government, and useful to every Government, had gradually become an almost indispensable part of the machinery of the State.—iii. 21. For the judges — Twelve men of conspicuous merit were selected.— iii. 22. For the household — Two of the chief places in the royal household were filled by two English noblemen eminently qualified to adorn a Conit. They were Dorset and Devonshire, always firmly devoted to the King. And was there not Somers, himself a host, whose praise Mr. Macaulay is never weary of sounding? Most :of these persons were faithful to the King through all trials. He had, no doubt, great ppposition to encounter from faction on both sides, but the sweeping charge which the his torian endeavours to fix on the whole body of public men of the time cannot be sustained by facts. In dealing with large questions, Mr. Macaulay is an advocate still. If there be one subject more than another on which we should expect him to be candid it is the Massacre of Glencoe. But his hero William must be cleared of all participation in that atrocity, and hence the whole narrative is falsified. The Master of Stair had strong hopes, he tells us, that the Highland clans would not submit, and he wrote from London a letter instructing the commander of the forces of Scotland how he should act in case the Jacobite claim should not come in by the end of December Your troops will destroy entirely the country of Lochaber, Loehiel's lands, Keppoolfs, Glengarry's, and Glencoe's. Your power shall be large enough. I hope the soldiers will not trouble the Government with prisoners.— iv. 202. Is it credible that the Master of Stair would have forwarded these decisive instructions on a matter of such magnitude without being first assured of the King's concurrence ? The Massacre of Glencoe was in every part delibe rately planned. The order sent from London to the military commander in Scotland ran:— THE PRESS. As for Mac lan of tilentioe and that tribe, if they can be well distinguished from the other Highlanders, it will be proper for the vindication of public justice to extirpate that set of thieves. Most readers will think the meaning of these words perfectly plain, especially if taken in connection with the previous instructions. But what gloss does the reader suppose Mr. Macaulay puts upon them? Here is his comment : These words naturally bear a sense perfectly innocent, and would, but for the horrible event which followed, have been universally understood in that sense. It is un doubtedly one of the first duties cf every Government to extirpate gangs of thieves. And the author goes on to say that, "if Wil " Liam had read and weighed the words which " were submitted to him by his secretary," he would only have understood them to mean that the clan was to be broken up, some sent to the army in the Low Countries, and some be made to give hostages for their good beha viour. This is a specimen of the style in which Mr Macaulay habitually indulges when facts tell against the view of any transaction he thinks it proper to adopt. He writes with his brief at his side, and peeps into it before he decides what line he shall adopt. If any proof were wanting of the complicity of the King, it would be found in his efforts to retard inquiry into this ruthless act, and in his finally screening the Master from punishment, when his guilt was established beyond the possibility of doubt. Had the massacre really been committed without the knowledge of William, his anger would have naturally fallen heavily on the Minister who had dared to so foully abuse his trust and bring such odium on his Government. There are a hundred other points in the history calling for comment. But we will allude to but one other on a totally different subject, the National Debt. In narrating the past Mr. Macaulay does not forget the present, and he is anxious to do his friends in office a good turn. Mr. Macaulay prudently refrains from entering very deeply into the funded system, but he indicates that the prosperity of the country has regularly increased with every increase of the national burdens, and he suggests a post hoc ergo propter hoe conclusion. He writes positively : A long experience justifies us in believing that England may in the twentieth century be better able to bear a debt of sixteen hundred millions than she is at the present time to bear her present load. This is bold, considering that we aro already far advanced in the nineteenth century. The purpose of the whole argument is obvious. We can go on increasing the debt as fast as we please, without the slightest apprehension of ill-con sequence. No doctrine more false or dan gerous can possibly be taught. One consi deration alone should make us hesitate to receive this flippant folly. Our population has nearly, if not quite, reached its limits ; every addition to our taxation must be an addition per bead, and must place our indus try at an immense disadvantage in competing with that of other lands (and of America par. ticularly) where the pressure of taxation is comparatively unfelt. It would be an endless task to mark the rhetorical exaggerations of Mr. Macaulay, as they are the most marked characteristic of his composition. When William 111. leaves West minster for Hampton Court, there is a long flourish on the desolation of Whitehall, " once " the daily resort of the noble and the power " ful, the beautiful and the gay, the place to " which fops came to show their new peruques, " men of gallantry to exchange glances with " fine ladies, politicians to push their for " tunes," and so forth, winding up with " solitary sentinel paced the grass-grown " pavement before that door which had once " been too narrow for the opposite streams of " entering and departing courtiers." When, early in January, 1690, the Tory members of the Commons wore summoned to town to oppose the Whig attempt to purge corporate bodies, we read : The whole kingdom was moved from Northumberland to Cornwall. A hundred knights and squires left their halls hung with misletoe and holly, and their boards groaning with brawn and plum-porridge, and rode up post to town, cursing the short days, the cold weather, the miry roads, and the villainous Whigs. In a romaxce by Mr. G. P. B. James, we should think such a passage appropriate, but SATURDAY, has it any place in history ? Why does not Mr. Macaulay cite authorities hero? We should like to see some credible testimony to the hundred knights and squires (we are re minded of the opening of Scott's " Lay "), carsing, as in a kind of chorus, " the short " days, the cold weather, the miry roads, and " the villainous Whigs." As a guard against being pressed too closely for authorities, Mr. Macaulay warns us in a note that if he does not cite authorities, it is because they are too numerous to cite, his statements being founded on thousands of forgotten tracts, sermons, and satires, moulding in old libraries. For florid description of ceremonies and rejoicings, these volumes far surpass any of Mr. Macaulay's former productions. On every occasion of festivity, " ale runs in gutters, and " wine spouts from conduits." When Con vocation meets in St. Paul's, the suffragans of Canterbury are described, "ranged in gorgeous_ " vestments of scarlet and minever.' When William enters London after the peace, " all " the companies provided new banners, ithe " magistrates new robes." Mr. Macaulay will miss no circumstance of a spectacle; he records how the streets were lined with gravel, how many coaches-and-six were in the procession, what militia were called out, and the exact number of tar-barrels that the Dutch Ambassador had lighted for a bonfire before his house, in St. James's square. The Jacobite faction is always at hand to fill up Mr. Macaulay's tableaux with any necessary amount of gloom and villany. When the nation rejoices, the Jacobites are filled with dismay; when public troubles are felt, the Jacobites are seen to drink secret healths, and heard to mutter threats over their ale. The climax of their despair is of course reached when William returns in triumph. " One unfortunate zealot of Divine right drowned himself." Another was held to bail for libel. And some others less desperate took the oaths of allegiance to William. The fourth volume concludes with a blaze of fire works (twelve thousand pounds worth) accom panied by immense shouting and bell-ringing, and a picture of universal festivity and con tentment. _ _ William is emphatically the author's hero ; but his character does not rise from a fair estimate of even Mr. Macaulay's narrative. He fell from the time that he submitted him self to the control of the Whig junto; and that peace of Ryswick which is here celebrated with so much fervour denotes a deplorable ►•ant of statesmanlike ability, as it took no care for the Spanish succession, which was at the time the event calling most urgently for settlement, and which speedily afterwards necessitated a renewal of the war. Mr. Macaulay's merits are great industry in the collection of his materials, and great ani mation and clearness in his narrative ; and these merits are so conspicuous in the volumes before us, that, in spite of their Nisi Prius spirit, their special pleading, their exaggera tion, and their rhetorical exuberance, we hope we may receive from him, at least, a continua tion of his work down to the term when the history of the Revolution of 1688 naturally concludes. Ths Politics of Aristotle. With English Notes. By Richard Congreve, M.A. London : J. W. Parker and Son. DR. ARNOLD, we believe, was the first to point out to the historical student the erroneous nature of the ordinary division between ancient and modern history. In his lectures on the latter subject, and his invaluable appendix to Thucydides, we are clearly shown how the later stages of the Greek and Roman commonwealths are, as far as their lesson is concerned, more strictly modern history than the reigns of our own Plantagenets or Tudor, and how the struggles between the so-called ancient factions are far more nearly related to what is now going on before us than those of the Edwards with their nobles, or the Charlases with their Parliaments. It is needless, there fore, to say another word on the public utility of such a work as Mr. Congreve's. One of the most striking features in the ancient writers, and one that cannot be toe strongly impressed ou the minds of all who