The Sun.
London, England, 1855-08-24 00:00:00

LITEIcATURE.

The _History of Europe ; from the Fall of Napoleon
to the Accession of Louis Napoleon. Vol. IV.
By Sir Archibald Alison, Bart. Blackwood.
The extraordinary undertaking upon which Sir
Archibald Alison adventured, almost simultane-
ously with the first announcement of this addition
to his great history is, even now hastening to-
wards its completion with a rapidity for which
those most intimately acquainted with his 'facile
hand, and fluent style, and indomitable persever-
ance could scarcely have been prepared. Already
two-thirds of the " Continuation to the original
work, descriptive of Europe, from the outbreak of
the French Revolution in 1789, to the last great
battle in the " war of giants," variously known
among the victors and the vanquished as that of
Waterloo or of Mont St. Jean, are at this moment
in our possession. Four out of the six promised
volumes, delineative of the events which trans-
pired in the comparatively tranquil but still sin-
gularly momentous interval of thirty-seven years,
extending from 1815 to 1852 ; from the downfall
of the Great Napoleon to the accession of his Im-
perial successor, have already made their appear-
ance. The fourteen volumes of the finest (the
library) edition of " Alison's History of Europe,"
have multiplied to eighteen upon our bookshelves.
At this rate of advance on the part of our annalist,
the score must very speedily be ranged together in
that familiar and frequented portion of our trea-
sury of literature. Sixty-three years, such as the
world has no record of, humanly speaking, com-
parable in their mighty influences upon the
destinies of the race of man, and upon the
growth of his wondrous scheme of civilisation, will
then have been portrayed by one master hand
through the medium of one homogeneous composi-
tion. The mere labour required to this end from
our author, in the way of preliminary research is of
itself somewhat bewildering in the mere contem-
plation. A cursory glance at the catalogue of the
principal works referred to by him in the original
enterprise will illustrate the fact here implied with
sufficient distinctness. That catalogue—prefixed
to the initial volume of every recent edition of the
" History of Europe"—numbers within itself, as
will doubtless be remembered by the majority of
observant readers, a library of no inconsiderable di-
mensions—a voluminous mass of memoirs, diaries,
letters, and autobiographies, to say nothing of
state papers, public journals, political pamphlets,
parliamentary shorthand reports, official corres-
pondence, and diplomatic despatches altogether
beyond the limits of ordinary calculation. Sir Ar-
chibald Alison, it must not be forgotten by those
who would estimate aright the value of his literary
enterprise, had to r ad these, to study them piece-
meal, to weigh one authority against another, to
eliminate from the chaos of evidence whatever was
simply supposititious or purely hypothetical, and
then, after all this enormous trial by way of prepa-
ratien, to draw out a distinct thread of narrative (if
any metaphor so seemingly affected, but in reality
so literally truthful in its elucidation, may be
allowed) to draw out, we say, a distinct thread of
narrative from the tangled mass of crud. facts,
dates, and memorabilia accumulated by his re-
searches, as the fibrous flax is collected upon the
shaft of the revolving spindle. That thread of the
wonderful narrative has not only been evolved by
him from the original jumble of the raw materials
required in its fabrication, but it has, in the fabric
of this " strange, eventful history," been woven
afterwards through weft and woof, in a rhetorical
broidery of singular and exquisite elaboration. The
opening of each additional volume is like the un-
folding of a new division of some extended tapestry.
The latest portion of these grand historical "hang-
ings" of the Walhalla spread before us for our
contemplation, discloses to view the varying spec-
tacle presented by the chief nations of Europe be-
tween 1822 and 1832—a decade fraught with so
many momentous consequences. It describes, for
example, among other things the deplorable condi-
tion of Ireland during the earlier agitations, caused
on one side by the Orange lodges and on the other
by the Secret Societies, such as those of the Rib-
bonmen, up to 1825, the year of the monetary
crisis, and ultimately to the March of 1829, the
ever-memorable date of Catholic Emancipation.
It delineates, again, England as she appeared in
her domestic history from the last-mentioned period
—that of Catholic Emancipation—down to the fall
of the Wellington Administration in 1830, and
subsequently to the passing of the famous Reform
Bill in 1832. While in reference to France the
annals of the period extend from the accession of
Louis Philippe, in the July of 1830, to the abolition
of the hei•editary peerage in the September of 1831;
the other great continental occurrences including in
their number the overthrow of the kingdom of the
Netherlands, and the rise and fall of the Polish
Revolution. The daring of the enterprise adven-
tured upon by Sir Archibald, when he resolved
upon continuing the History of Europe, from the
Battle of Waterloo, down to a time almost
mediately contemporaneous, has become, we fancy,
in the present volume, even to the least divining,
signally apparent. In the twenty-third chapter,
for example, we find our annalist beginning with
page 280, and ending with page 293, each inclu-
sively, taking into consideration one by one the
characters of the chief statesmen of his time, sketch-
ing off, in this manner, with a few master touches,
the distinguishing features of the late Earl Grey,
of Lord Bronghain, of Lord Melbourne, of Lord
John Russell, and of Sir James Graham—as in
other portions of this same volume we find Psi
pencilling the salient points in the genius and cha-
racters of such men as Robert Peel, George • Can-
ning, Daniel O'Connell, and William Huskisson.
However much Sir Archibald may endeavour to
write at these times from the serene altitude of his
torical impartiality, he cannot for the life of him
help blurting out that vitriolic partisanship which
has constituted so long the principal cautery in the
political correctives of Maga ! It is evidently
with a kind of exalting gusto that he transcribes
the diatribe indulged in by Miss Harriet Martineau,
when that free-thinking bas bleu undertakes to re-
prehend, in a kindred strain of high-flown
scurrility, what she calls " the atrocity of
the language" indulged in by the late liberator.
We are glad to observe our author, when he is
speaking of Lord Brougham, not only cAnbatting
an absurd popular delusion in his regard, when he
says of the great law-lord ."it is a mistake to
imagine that he proved a failure on the bench,"
but paying to his genius and his career that full
meed of panegyric which will he his indubitably in
the hereafter. It is amusing, by the way, after we
have scanned the few sentences of feeble commen-
dation vouchsafed to Lord • John Russell by our
honest, plain-spoken Tory annalist, to maditate for
an instant over the position perversely assume' by
the noble lord since this estimate of his character
was written by Sir Archibald—and then to remsm-
her the almost miraculous exactitude with whicii
that position was in a manner foreseen by a writer
of fiction several long years ago, we mean by the
late W. H. Maxwell, who, in his "Stories of
Waterloo," thus unconsciously sketched out the
career of Lord John Russell, when he spoke in
these words of his imateinary Earl of Eustoeby,
" For many years the Earl had held a leading situa-
tion in the Cabinet ; but owing to causes not rele-
vant to this story, he had failed in a diplomatic
mission, fallen into disgrace, and been obliged to
retire, from office." See the tale of " S.irsfiehi" in
the "Stories of Waterloo," vol. 1, p. 62. A sen-
tence that, we take it, to the very T, descriptive
of the position arrived at very recently by Lord
John Russell. Not thus prophetic in regard to
Lord John are the words of the historian of
Europe, who kap of him, mal h,propos enough,
"In one respect his conduct has always been
worthy of the very highest admiration—
lie never shirks responsibility"—saying this,
observe, on the very eve of that return from
Vienna, where the responsibility, ex .lusively in-
curred by himself, of recommending the Cabinet
to accede to the terms proposed by Austiia, was
shirked altogether by the noble lord in that speech
which cannot very easily be either forgiven or
forgotten, in which, by a daring reticence, he
shamefully concealed the truth from the knowledge
of the Imperial Parliament. Returning to the consi-
deration of the work before us, however, it will be
enough for us to add that it constitutes an accurate
record of the more memorable facts which trans-
pired in Europe, principally as already intimated
in England, and France, and Poland, and the
Netherlands, during ten of the nearly forty years'
peace which succeeded the last deadly European
struggle on the plains of Waterloo. As a scrupulous
record of facts, indeed,fwe have all along conceived
Sir Archibald's great work to be as solidly reliable
as we cannot but regard it to be directly the re-
verse—namely, both fallacious and illusory—in the
vast majority of its political deductions. He de-
duces as a partisan, but he recounts as an annalist.
And surely we may concede to him the right to his
own opinions, if only in gratitude for his profound
researches—researches enabling him, as the Genius
of Fact, to emulate (with an especial emphasis on
the participle—an emphasis readily appreciable on
a glance at the eighteen large octavo volumes al-
ready contributed by Alison to our national store
of historic literature)—enabling him, we say, to
emulate the Genius of Fancy, as described by the
poet—

" Pouring from the pictured urn,
Thoughts that breaths, and words that burn."

The Principles and Practice of the Water Cure,
and Household Medical SciPnce ; in Conversa-
tions, &c. By James Wilson, M.D. Second
Edition. John Churchill. . •
It would have surprised us had these remarkable
Conversations on Physiology and Pathology not