The Sun.
London, England, 1836-05-05 00:00:00

LITERAT URE.

LARDNER'S CABINET CYCLOPEDIA.

LIVES of L7MINENT BRITISH STATESMEN.
VOL. 11. Longman and Co.

The Lives of those Eminent British Statesmen who ac-
celerated and directed the two great Revolutions of Eng-
land, though ratl:cr belonging to general history than to
biography, may he so written as to prove of inestimable
benefit to posterity. As public men they were a " part
and parcel of the times in which they lived ; and to give
even the faintest outline of their influence in the directing
and repelling of measures and attacks, requires a luminous
and rapid exposition of the character of their friends and
enemies ; the relative strength of their own and their op-
ponents' party ; and the degree of vigilance and energy
employed against them. This evidently extends to a history
of the entire period ; and is as much a biographical sketch
of all the actors in it as of the personage selected as the
prinCipal. The other mode of writing such biographies—
the one of which we mainly approve—is to give only the
private life of the individual, without any reference what-
ever to his public conduct. This would serve as a most
useful commentary upon many public acts otherwise inex-
plicable. The philosopher would thus be enabled to trace
effects to their real causes, without being compelled to assign
imaginary motives for conduct apparently inconsistent with
itself ; and the legislator would learn how necessary the
cultivation of certain habits, and feelings, and associations
is to the securing of a well-merited popularity.
The volume, whose title is prefixed to this notice, falls
far short of our standard of biographical excellence ; al-
though we will not deny the author the merit of consider-
able industry. It includes the lives of Sir John Eliot,
'and the great but unfortunate Earl of Strafford. Mr.
Foster has made but indifferent use of the mass of materials
which every compiler of the history of the. first revolution
has pointed out or quoted, and his life of Strafford is one of
the tamest performances of the kind we ever met with.
The author seems either to, have _no opinion of his own,

where his opinion is most required, or he expresses it so
coldly, and with such indecision, that the reader is rather
perplexed than assisted to a proper conclusion. On the
whole, he is an apologist of Strafford, rather than the advo-
cate of his principles, or the defender of his conduct.
Though he seeks not to palliate the infamous acts of the
Lord Deputy in his relation of them, yet he expresses no
strong abhorrence, but rather labours to reconcile them
with the whole tenour of his life, and the principles in-
stilled into him during his childhood. This is to make
Strafford out a much worse man than he really was—to
remove from him the stain of apostasy, but to replace it
with the worst attribute of a fiend—consistency in evil.
Upon this Mr. Foster has a remarkable passage, which
occurs upon Wentworth's desertion of the liberal party, or
rather, when he first bartered away the liberties of his
country for a coronet :
" In one word, what it is desired to impress upon the reader,
brfore the delineation of Wentworth in his after years, is this—
diet he was consistent to himself throughout. I have always
considered that much good wrath is thrown away upon what
is usually called apostasy.' In the majority of cases, if the
circumstances are thoroughly examined, it will be found that
there has been no such thing.' The position on which the
acute Roman thought fit to base his whole theory of /Esthetics—
" Humans) eapiti cervicem pictor equinam
Jungere si velit, et varies inducere plumes,
Undique collatis mernbris, ut turpiter atram
Desinat in piscem mailer formosa surperne,
Spectatum admissi risum teneatis, amici ?"'
—is of far wider application than to the exigencies of an art
of poetry ; and those who carry their researches into the moral
nature of mankind, cannot do better than impress upon their
minds, at the outset, that in the regions they explore, they
are to expect no monsters—no essentially discordant termina-
tion to any mulier formosa superne.' Infinitely and distinctly
various as appear the shifting hues of our common nature when
subjected to the prism of circumstance, each ray into which it
is broken is no less in itself a primitive colour, susceptible,
indeed, of vast modification, but incapable of further division.
Indolence, however, in its delight for broad classifications,
finds its account in overlooking this ; and among the results,
none is more conspicuous than the long list of apostates with
which history furnishes us. It is very true, it may be admit-
ted, that when we arc informed by an old chronicler that at
this time, Ezzelin changed totally his disposition,'—or by a
modern biographer that at such a period, Tiberius first be-
came a wicked prince,'—ve examine too curiously if we con-
sider such information as in reality regarding other than the
act done, and the popular inference recorded ; beyond which
it was no part of the writer to inquire. But such historians
as these value themselves materially on their dispensation of
good or evil fame ; and as the complete change,' so drama-
tically recounted, has commonly no mean influence on the na-
ture of their award, the observations I have made may be of
service to the just estimate of their more sweeping conclusions.
" Against all such conclusions I earnestly protest in the
case of the remarkable personage whose ill-fated career we
are now retracing. Let him be judged sternly, but in no un-
philosophic spirit. In turning from the bright band of pa-
triot brothers to the solitary Strafford—' a star which dwelt
apart'—we have to contemplate no extinguished splendour,
razed and blotted from the book of life. Lustrous, indeed,
as was the gathering of the lights in the political heaven of
this great time, even that radiant cluster might have exulted
in the accession of the comet beautiful and fierce,' which tar-
ried a while within its limits ere it dashed athwart with train
of flame.' But it was governed by other laws than were
owned by its golden associates, and—impelled by a contrary,
yet no less irresistible force, than that which restrained them
within their eternal orbits—it left them, never to ' float into
that azure heaven again."'
Nothing can be clearer, from the above, than that Mr.
Foster does not know the meaning of apostacy—that he
confounds the perpetration of acts with the advocacy of
fixed and immutable principles. ‘‘ Wentworth," lie says,
" was consistent to himself throughout !" How ? Assuredly
Mr. Foster proves the very contrary. Was it consistency
to suffer iniprisanment rather than pay a subsidy to the
King without the consent of Parliament, and afterwards,
when the country was in less danger, to raise such a sub-
slay, not only without the consent, but in defiance of an Act
of the Legislature ? Was Wentworth consistent with him-
self when, after first declaring for the liberal party in Par-
liament, he subsequently stated, in his letters to Arch-
bishop Lau a, that Hampden deserved the pillory and public

whipping for his opinions The only thing in which
Wentworth was consistent to himself throughout was in
sacrificing every principle of honour, patriotism, and reli-
gion to the advancement of his personal ambition, up to
the moment of his impeachment by the Commons of Eng-
land. Strafford was a man who cared not what party he
served, or in what course he embarked, provided it pro-
mised the gratification of a malignant revenge, and an in-
satiable thirst for personal aggrandisement. It is to be
presumed that Mr. Foster " thoroughly examined the
circumstances" of Wentworth's change from a fiery patriot,
whose speeches in favour of liberty in the famous " third
Parliament," alarmed even Butingham, to one of the
west daring and daverous tools ;at' kingly despotism that
ever appoared in England. And yet how does he redeem
the memory of Wentworth from the charge of apostasy?
Why, infereutially at iseast, by making him, as we said be-
fore, a fiend. He represents IVentworth, out of the most
deadly hatred to Sir John Saville and the Duke of Buck-
ingham, entering into a conspiracy with the liberals—whom
he deceived by his professions of attachment to Parlia-
ments and the Constitution—to liMit the prerogatives of the
Crown beyond what was contemplated by Eliot, Denzil
Hollis, and the true p.itriots of the time , and afterwards for
a coronet, agreeing, first, to betray his party, and secondly,
to act as the tool of the very men whom he before so
deeply detested. Mr. Hallam, from whose " Constitu-
tional History" a life of Strafford, as copious, and much
more philosophic than the ()rye before us, might be com-
piled, thus concludes his admirable summary of his cha-
racter :

" The passages which I have thus largely quoted will, I
trust, leave no doubt in • any reader's mind that the Earl of
Strafford was party a conspiracy to subvert the fundamental
and liberty of his country. For here are not, as on his
trial, accusations of words spoken in
heat, uncertain as to proof,
and of ambiguous interpretation ; tier of actions variously re-
ported, and eftaable of some explanation ; but the sincere un-
bosorning of the heart in letters paver designed to come to
And if we reflect upon this man's cool-blooded APOS-
TACY on the first lure to his ambition, and on his splendid
aHitics, which enhanced the guilt of that desertion, we must
feel some indignation at those who have palliated all his ini-
quities, and even ennobled his memory with the attributes of
patriot heroism. * But it may be reckoned as a
sufficient ground for distrusting; any one's attachment to the
EnsTlish Constitution, that he reveres the name of the Earl of
Strafford."

Hume is the oply English historian that we know of
who has sought to &f ad the conduct of Strafford, and to
cast odium on the sentence by which he suffered. On
such a question his authority is of little weight, as he was
ignorant of the law, and detested the Principles of Straf-
ford's accusers. Though Lord Straillord's death," says
Hume, " was loudly demanded as a satisfaction to justice
and an atonement for the many violations of the Constitu-
tion, it may safely be affirmed, that the sentence by which