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

as those of a badger, his forehead low as that of a
baboon, his purple cheeks, and his monstrous length
of chin," disclosing, in short, " those hideous features,
on which viilany seemed to he written by the hand of
God." Subsequently his delineation of the characters
cf. Halifax, of Clarendon, of I‘:Lrlborougli, of Jef-
freys, and of Mac Callum More may be classed among
the most successful achievements of a pea by no
means habituated to failliee. The narrative of the
Great Plague and of the Great Fire ; the description
of the panic which seized upon London when the fleet
of Holland was in the Thames ; the account of the
anti-Popery rage, provoked by the fabrications of
Oates, of Carstairs, of Bedloe, of Dugdale, of Tuber-
ville, and of Dangerfield—are all of them passages
dictated in a spirit as life-like as Froissart and as
picturesque as Boccaccio. it is, however, in the ac-
count of the demise of King Charles the Second
that, to our thinking, Mr.' Macaulay has
revealed his genius in its full vigour. We know
nothing more eloquent than this in the language. It
ii)..nks with a serene but sorrowful voice to the heart's
core. We are not ashamed te cuufess th it it deeply
touched our 6ensibtlities during the-1 perusal. That
temperament would be frigid indeed that could read
it unagitated by emotions of sympathy. It is the
ebullition of a lung-cherished sentiment—a sentiment
of tenderness for that " exquisite urbanity" which in
the Merry Monarch had so often Foved " potent to
charm away the resentment of a justly incensed
nation." The historian has shown himself less lenient
and, in our. estimation, more prejudiced, in his analysis
of the character of James the Second. In this we
conceive exists the principal blemish of the two vo-
lumes already published. King James was doubtless
in many respects an enemy to the popular freedom—
his mind was saturnine, his temper obdurate, his reli-
gious predilections stern almost to bigotry—but we
can never believe in those unmitigated monsters of
humanity which belong rather to romance than to
reality, rather to fiction than to nature. Such a monster
was James, according to Mr. Macaulay; and the hatred
entertained towards the last Stuart King carries him
to such lengths of vituperation that he regards James
as malignant even in his acts of clemency (I. 659,
660), he vilifies him as unforgiving even while re-
cording his generous connivance at the escape of
Wade, of Ferguson, and of Goodenough ! The argu
meats with which the author strives to justify his
condemnation upon these particulars are wretchedly
overstrained ; and a more striking testimony could
scarcely be discovered of the truth of the axiom, that
extremes are beyond the rightful province of an his-
torian.

Among the numerous peculiarities which charac-
terize the memorable work under consideration, and
which isolate it, to a considerable extent, from all
other historical productions, one of the most conspi-
cuous is the survey taken by the annalist of the con-
dition of the people, of their habits, of their dwellings,
of their costume, of their furniture, of their amuse-
ments, of the appearance of the towns and the home-
steads, of the extent of the population, of the
geographical aspect of the country, and of those other
particulars in the life of a nation which are too fre-
quently forgotten in the records of campaigns or
in the changes of administrations. It would be a
grievous error, nevertheless, to regard Mr. Alacaulay
as the originator of this scheme for the improvement
of history. He stands by no means alone as the ex •
ponent of the inner existence of an empire. What he
has here deliberately and systematically accomplished
has been incidentally performed by almost all his
illustrious predecessors. Tacitus had already many
centuries ago described the domestic manners of the
German barbarians. In the seventeen books of his
immortal History, Polybius had given to posterity
fragmentary hints of the same nature. In his ac-
count of the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides had
proceeded upon a similar principle ; and so also had
flerodotus in his elegant representation of the state
of the Grecian Republics and of their contests with
the Persians from Cyrus to Xerxes. The mytholo-
gical rites of the Romans, suggesting to us the cus-
toms of that glorious race, had in like manner been
casually recounted by Livy. From Cicero we had
acquired some knowledge of the homes, and the
garbs, and the frivolities, and the appetites of his
fellow-citizens. From Caesar we, in an especial
manner, had obtained a glimpse into the situation of
our forefathers—facts relating to their familiar exist-
ence being scattered through his " Commentaries"
from Gallia est omnis divisa down to quam Belli ge-
reruli. The merit of Mr. Macaulay, therefore, is—not
that he has opened a new vein for historical composition,
not that he has adventured upon a region of research
hitherto unexplored, not that he has contrived a novel
embellishment with which to set off the austere love-
liness of Clio, but that he has judiciously compacted
together what had been hitherto scattered neglectfully
through similar memorials, that he has reduced to a
resplendent system what had been heretofore em-
ployed as a casual decoration, that he has done, in
fine, prepense, what other men similarly engaged had
before him done inadvertently. Acting upon this
felicitous principle, the annalist has here produced a
chapter (Chap. 3, Vol. I.) upon the state of England
at the period when King James, immediately after
his coronation, had a solemn high mass chaunted for
the last time in Westminster Abbey, and when, sin-
cerest among all the mourners for the departed Sove-
reign were his beautiful concubines Eleanor
Gwynne, the most fascinating of all the succes-
sors of Lucy Walters, Barbara Palmer, the
Duchess of Cleveland, Louisa of Queroraille, the
Duchess of Portsmouth, Madame Carwell, and Hor-
tensia Mancini, the Duchess of Mazarin. Without
depreciating in the smallest particular the more ele-
vated passages in the " History of England" by Mr.
Macaulay, we must acknowledge that this portion of
it, though of a less dignified character, has a charm
for us superior to almost any composition we have
recently had the privilege of perusing. In it the
illustrious writer displays a capacity even beyond
what has been happily described as an encyclopmdicin-
tellect. His mind reveals, indeed, a faculty kindred
to that astonishing power of the steam•engine, which
sometimes sets in motion the cumbrous and compli-
cated mechanism of a manufactory, while it some-
times draws out a wire to the attenuated thinness of
a bristle, and perforates it with an orifice as minute
as that made by a pin-point. Thus is it with the
pliant and versatile genius of Mr. Macaulay. At one
moment he expatiates upon that sublime scheme of
the Prince of Orange, which, says he, in terms ex-
pressive of his admiration (1.218), "has an aspect of
antique heroism, which, if it had been accomplished,
would have been the noblest subject for epic song
that is to be found in the whole compass of modern
history." At another he informs us (I. 354) that
" the practice of huzzaing after drinking heulths"
originated at the time of the forfeiture of the old
charter of the corporation of the city of London,
when the Puritanical functionaries were replaced by
magistrates analogous in their political partialities to
the Cavaliers. Thus again he can, in fitting terms,
pronounce his abhorrence of the barbarism which
survived in Whitefriars at the very period when phi-
losophy, poetry, theology, and jurisprudence were
cultivated by some of our most renowned country-
men (I. 364) a savage ignorance flourishing
" within a short walk of the chambers where Somers
was studying history and law, of the chapel where
Tillotson was preaching, of the coffee-house where
Dryden was passing judgment on poems and plays,
and of the hall where the Royal Society was examin-
ing the astronomical system of Isaac Newton." Or
he can condescend to trace the derivation of a pro-
verb (I. 316. note), and to indicate the precise year
in which (I. 256) " our tongue was enriched" with
two such words as Mob and Sham. Nor will this
precision on the part of our author be objected to, as
being frivolous, when he is found in like manner
tracking the rise and development of the British Ca-
binet as the medium of administration (I. 211), or
defining the origin of the Whigs and Tories
(1. 99), as well as the appearance of that intermediate
class of politicians known as Trimmers, a class of
which Halifax was long the most distinguished orna-
ment. The miscellaneous character of the observa-
tions grouped together in this remarkable dissertation
upon the resources and aspect of England contem-
porary with the accession of James, affords a brilliant
token of the knowledge accumulated in the mind of
an historian—accumulated not merely by a scholarly
inquisitiveness into learning, purely for the sake of it
as learning, and apart from any positive object in
connexion with literature, but by the subsequent in-
quiries demanded as a preparation for such a work as
the one here introduced to the notice of our readers.
The retrospect is at once topographical, statistical,eex-
pression—popular. sanitary, literary, and—in the largest sense ofth
witha
After presenting us
lances
census of the population anterior to the Rsevoluti evolution t
and the final settlement, Mr. Macau ay g
the financial wealth of the country
a; at the.
at the wages ob-
propur-
tionate distribution of property;.
gricultural and
tained by the industrial classes,s tab
t7tish a
of the principal
manufacturing ; and at the
York, Exeter, Wor-
cities such as Bristol,, Norwich,ster,
Shrewsbury, and the
center, Nottingham, amusing portrait of the
country
te
Gloucester,
metropolis.
of the age of the
He gives an
Stuarts (I.
country gentleman
321), " his wife and daughter being, in tastes and
acquirements, below a
spinning
housekeeper or a still-room
in,
maid of the present day,—stitching. and •
brewing gooseberry wine, curing mary golds, and
making the crust for the venison pasty." He sketches
with the same humourous touch the rural
parson of
the same epoch (I. 328), a poor starveling of a
di-
vine, who, though permitted to dine with the family,
i
might fill himself with the corn beef andthe
carrots, but as soon as the tarts and cheesecakes made
their appearance was compelled to quit his seat and
stand aloof until summoned to return thanks for the
re past from a great part of which he had been ex-
, c uded." Further on he indulges in an admirable
i delineation of the state of the capital, from the do-
mestic buildings to the shop-signs, from the coffee-
homes to the public thoroughfares, and from the mu-
nicipal authorities to the night rioters variously de-
signated as the Muns and the Tityre Tus, the Hectors