The Sun.
London, England, 1849-01-23 00:00:00

tion, saying, as he does, somewhat affectedly, " yet a
COW months ; and the quiet village of Tothlington,"
is (1. 630), or recounting with equal affectation the
capture of Rumbold (i. 566 ) thus—" Ile defended
Himself desperately, and would have cut his way
through them had not they hatnstringed his horse."
Objections so minute would doubtless savour too
much of hypercriticism; but that, regarding Mr.
Macaulay as one who has already a,sumed his posi-
tion as a classic by the side of Burke, of Swift, and
of Gibbon, we would see blemishes removed from a
masterpiece, in which, if allowed to remain enshrined,
they might rise into precedents tending ultimately to
vitiate the language. Viewing his splendid under-
taking in one capacious glance, Mr. Macaulay has
been enabled to preserve a proportionate dignity
throughout the whole of its dimensions; hut in
keeping his observation thus steadily fixed upon the
aspect of the work as a whole, he has occasionally
permitted its constituent parts to remain blurred with
oversights. Hence it is :that his verbiage is not
altogether devoid of Mannerism,: h> designates
by the same stereotyped eiAliet a King, a Ch incellor,
and a body of soldiers (L 407.), the tr wps of Fever-
sham are " the wicked ariti" (L 449), Jeffreys is
"the wicked judge," and (L-661) James 11. is " the
wicked king." With a more reprehensible inadvert-
ency, Mr. Macaulay has penned this refliction (1.74) :
—" During two hundred years all the sovereigns
who had ruled England, with the single exception of
Henry the Sixth, had been strong-minded, high-
spirited, courageous, and of princely bearing." And
yet Edward IV. could scarcely be termed "strong-
minded" when absorbed in his effeminate voluptuous-
ness at Woodstock, and Edward V. and Edward VI.
were both children ! In spite, nevertheless, of these
isolated and interjectional errors, the "History of
England" by Mr. Macaulay has the largest claims
upon our respect for its accuracy, while in regard to
its rhetorical splendour it may vie with the most ela-
borately perfected effusions in our literature.
Already we have remarked upon the embarrassing
contiguity of the epoch delineated in this history
to the present generation. As if to afford a
striking evidence of the brevity of the interval which
has elapsed between that period and the days of Vic-
toria, it is mentioned in the description of the last
battle ever fought in England—the battle of Sedge-
moor (I. 604)—that " many persons still living have
seen the daughter of the servant-girl who waited on
Feversham" when, on the eve of the conflict, he dined
in a little cottage in the village of West Zoyland. It
would be singularly erroneous, however, to imagine
that in• this circumstance exists the principal diffi-
culty of the task upon which our great living annalist
has adventured. The labour of the undertaking is
immeasurably enhanced by the wonderful character
of the years which have intervened. The marvellous
development of our liberties and the almost miracu-
lous extension of our dominions since the downfal of
the Stuart dynasty, render the era chosen by Mr.
Macaulay as the subject of his lucubrations one so
abounding in events and so intricately complicated
in policy as almost to defy condensation into
any reasonable limits. That the project, of
which these two large volumes of 1339
octavo pages constitute merely the indication, is of a
nature so replete with embarassment may be compre-
hended to some extent after the reader has listened to
the voice of the historian relating to him—" how the
new settlement was, during many troubled years,
successfully defended against foreign and domestic
enemies; how, under that settlement the authority
of law and the security of property were found to be
compatible with a liberty of discussion and of indi-
vidual action never before known ; how from the
auspicious union of order and freedom, sprang a pros-
perity of which the annals of human affairs had fur-
nished no example ; how our country from a state of
ignominious vassalage rapidly rose to the place of
umpire among European powers; how her opulence
and her martial glory grew together ; how by wise
and resolute good faith was gradually established a
public credit fruitful of marvels which to the states-
men of any former age would have seemed incredible ;
how a gigantic commerce gave birth to a maritime
power compared with which every other maritime
power, ancient or modern, sinks into insignificance ;
how Scotland, after ages of enmity, was united to
England, not merely by legal bonds, but by indisso-
luble ties of interest and affection ; how in America
the British colonies rapidly became far mightier and
wealthier than the realms which Cortes and Pizarro
had added to the realms of Charles the Fifth ; how,
in Asia, British' adventurers founded an empire not
less splendid and more durable than that of Alex-
ander." Such are the sublime and glorious achieve-
ments which Mr. Macaulay has ambitioned to in-
scribe, and which he is now actually inscribing, not
upon plates of brass, or on pyramids of granite, or on
tablets of gold, but in the imperishrble characters of
an eloquence which will prove as perennial as that
Saxon tongue in which it is conveyed. _

Before the circumstances which-marked the acces-
sion of James the Second are narrated, the author
preludes the history of that unfortunate Monarch with
several prefatory chapters descriptive, in a rapid
epitome, of the previous occurences, illustrating the
introduction of Christianity and the dawn of civiliza-
tion into England. This comprehensive retrospect
extends backwards to the fabulous ages prior to the
subjugation of Britain by the Roman Emperors, and
returns with hasty but measured steps down the path-
way previously trodden by the Chroniclers, by Bede,
by Rapin, by Holinshed, by Hume, by Sharon
.turner, y Henry, by Lingard, by Hallam by
Clarendon, by Fox, by Mackintosh, and by kindred
annalists. After commenting upon the effects pro-
duced upon the insular institutions of the Saxon race
by the victorious incursion of the Normans, our his-
torian developes in one energetic paragraph (I. 17)
the origin of the freedom, the prosperity and the glory
of England, in the midst of the obscurity and sterility
of the thirteenth century. " Other societies," he
says further on (I. 25), " possess written constitu-
tions more symmetrical ; but no other society has
yet succeeded in uniting revolution with prescrip-
don, progress with stability, the energy of youth
with the majesty of immemorial antiquity." The
truth of this elevated encomium affords a clue to the
security of our political fabric and a guarantee for
its future permanence. Nevertheless at the early
period of which the author is there treating, the Ad-
ministration could scarcely be applauded in those
unstinted terms of eulogium. And, conscious, evi-
dently, of the anomaly of any such precipitate
panegyric, he remarks (1. 30) that "as eloquence
exists before syntax, and song before prosody, so
government may exist in a high degree of excellence
long before the limits of legislative, executive, and
judicial power have been traced with precision."
Although the ingenuity with which this is reasoned
may dispose the mind at first to recoil from the de-
duction as from a sophism, reflection will only tend
to verify its correctness. And, in proof of this, we
are told with a considerable show of justice (1., 37)
that, "though during the feeble reign of Henry the
Sixth the State was torn first by factions, and at
length by civil war, though Edward the Fourth was
a prince of dissolute and imperious character, though
Richard the Third has generally been represented as
a monster of depravity, though the exactions of
Henry the Seventh caused great repining, it is cer-
tain that our ancestors, under those kings, were far
better governed than the Belgians under. Philip, sur-
named the Good, or the French under that Lewis
who was styled the father of his people." The
secret of all this may possibly be as Mr. Macaulay
supposes (I. 39), the coincidence that " our democracy
was, from an early period, the most aristocratic, and
our aristocracy the most democratic in the world."
Whatever the cause, it is indisputable that our liber-
ties have, with few and momentary interruptions,
steadily widened to their present grandeur in the
teeth of every obstruction ; and that, since the moment
of their dawning, they have wrested additional
smtroesntgdtehsptitoothemselves, evelnt wasfrom the hands
that
ma
of our
Charta was wrung from John upon Runnymede,
that the Petition :of Bight was forced from Charles
I. at the very time when he was plotting against his
Parliament, and that Habeas Corpus was torn
from Charles 11. at the juncture when he was pre-
paring to render the fortunes of his kingdom subser-
vient to the will of Lewis the Fourteenth. How
gradually, and almost imperceptibly, and yet how
steadily and surely, these advantages were accumu-
lating round the Constitution during the sway of se-
veral successive dynasties—under the dominion of the
Plantagenets, of the Houses of York and Lancaster, of
the Tudors, and of the Stuarts, down to the explosion of
the great civil war, and the establishment of the Com-
monwealth—Mr. Macaulay has explained in language
melodious as the utterance of oratory. His account of
the bearing of Charles I. at his execution (I. 128),
" the captive king retaining in that extremity all his
regal dignity, and confronting death with dauntless
courage ;" his description of the Puritan warriors (I.
121) " moving to victory with the precision of ma-
chines, while burning with the wildest fanaticism of
crusaders ;" his portraiture of Oliver Cromwell (I.
139 and 155), whom he justly designates as " the
greatest prince that has ever ruled England ;" his
scorn of the affected sanctity of the Precisians (I.
'163) in interdicting, on Christmas-day, such harm-
less recreations as " romping under the mistletoe,
eating boar's head, and drinking ale flavoured with
roasted apples ;" and his participation in the laughtert
with which those fanatics were subsequently greeted,
under such soubriquets as Tribulationa Wholesome,
and
int do
11Z8 Zeal-of-the-Land -of-
everyth e
shred
dd
fB us
theiry,
throughout these
skill with which Mr. Macaulay,
historical
volumes, interpolates sketches of
we need only
charac-
ters in the course of the narrative,
of James 1.,
direct attention to
/htiNg mentioniexhibited royalty to
who, he says (1. •
sword, and talking in
tears, trembling at aretr e a alltm eanti"raAbsle—tofetlit
of a buffoon and of a peda-
gogue style alternately.
..
." or to his limning of the notorious Titus
gogue .
with " his short neck, his legs uneven
Oates (I. 483), drawn sword,
shedding unmanly
the world stammering,