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

I,ONDON, TIT rIA JAN UAR Y 23. 1849.

M.A,CAULA'i-S

HISTORY Of ENGLAND.
FIiCA THE ACCESSION OF JAMX,S TIIE

SECOND.
VOLS. I. AND 11.

Already renowned as an Orator, admired as a Poet,
esteemed as a Statesman, respected as a Critic, and
distinguished as an Essayist, Mr. Macaul.ly has now
risen to the celebrity of an Historian. 'We greet his
appearance in this new character with the cordiality
due to one who has resigned office as a Cabinet
Minister to record the annals of his country, and.
who, in so doing has added another master-piece to
those great productions which constitute the glory
of our national literature. We appreciate the sacri-
fice made by the late Paymaster of her Majesty's
Forces, in abandoning the charms of Administr ition,
for tlp purpose of dedicating his Genius and his
Ambition to the service of Letters. Nor is our esti-
mation of this sacrifice diminished by a sense of the
extraordinary toil required in the composition of such
volumes as are here submitted to our criticism. 'fo
write a narrative of the foundation of an empire,
to describe the rise of a colony into existence, or
to record the origin and development of a nation, is
a task very different indeed from the one undertaken
by Mr. Macaulay. For the further the time of
history is removed towards the ages of antiquity, the
less difficult is it to accumulate the requisite authorities,
and, on the other hand, the nearer the time of history
approaches towards ourselves the more are the labours
of investigation, of compilation, and of discrimina-
tion, enhanced. We say this without in any manner
wishing to depreciate the compositions of such a
scholar as Mr. Grote, or of such an annalist as M.
Niebuhr. But we conceive it to be sufficiently mani-
fest that the toils of an historian in collecting together
the materials of his narrative must be proportionately
increased with the increase of those materials. There
is no question but that more care is required in the
collation of manuscripts penned at a remote period,
than in the acceptance, as facts, of assertions com-
mitted to paper at an epoch more within our own
cognizance. Yet, even after taking this circumstance
into consideration, we do not hesitate to affirm that
the obstacles which have to be overcome in recount-
ing the vicissitudes of the Athenian Republic from
the reign of Pericles down to the invasion of the
Goths under Alaric, are in no degree comparable to
those which remain to be vanquished in recording
the progress of the English Monarchy, from the
accession of James the Second downwards. In
order the more fully to understand the vast energy
and the unremitting assiduity essential to success
in the latter instance, we need only refer
to the multiplicity of the resources from which Me
Macaulay has obtained his details. And in referring
to those resources we are filled with absolute amaze-
ment at the patience with which they have been ex-
amined, notwithstanding the obscurity of some, the
difficulty of obtaining access to others, and the
bewildering voluminousness of nearly all. MSS. at
the Hague, in the archives of France, in the
Government establishments of the Peninsula, in the
State-paper Offices scattered throughout London,
have all been conned, no matter how recondite in
character, or how illegible in penmanship. Enormous
masses of Journals—both the Parliamentary Journals
of the House of Commons, and the Public Journals,
beginning with the Observator of Sir Roger
L'Estrange, and coming down to contemporary news-
papers—have been pored over with a scrupulous cau-
tion almost amounting to punctilio. Fragmentary
chapters, such as those of Lord. Clarendon, of Charles
Fox, and of Sir James Mackintosh, have been sub-
mitted to innumerable tests for the purpose of tracing
out an inaccuracy. Memoirs and autobiographies,
correspondence and tracts, philosophical treatises and
theological. disputations, fly leaves and folios, doggrels
and epics, pasquinades and eulogiums, have each been
thrown into the crucible of inquiry to contribute their
grain of gold towards the fabrication of the Great
Work. Acts of Parliament, the mere enumeration
of which would be beyond the capacity of most men's
endurance, have found in Mr. Macaulay an unflag-
ging and laborious annotator. One while he ac-
knowledges in graceful terms (I. 391. note), the
benefit he has derived from scrutinizing the miscel-
laneous papers of his " dear and honoured friend"
Sir James Mackintosh. At another moment he pays
a magnificent tribute of respect to the genius of the
late Prime Minister of France (I. 46.5. note,) when,
alluding to the copies of dispatches obtained through
the instrumentality of that remarkable but fallen
statesman, he says, " It is with peculiar pleasure,
that, at this time, I acknowledge this mark of the
friendship of so great a man." [The homage is the
more beautiful seeing that M. Guizot is now in exile
and in misfortune.] In a third note our historian
mentions as his authority for the account given by
him of the cruelties inflicted upon the rebels sen-
tenced to transportation during the Bloody Assizes
(I. 653. note,) an original MS. written by a car-
penter named Coad, in 1685, the year of the Mon-
mouth Rebellion. In a fourth (I. 351. note,) he
refers for corroboration to Ward's scurrilous periodical
the London Spy, and, in the very act of confessing
his authority, makes this significant declaration—" I
am almost ashamed to quote such nauseous balder-.
dash; but I have been forced to descend even
lower, if possible, in search of materials." It
is thus that he sometimes condescends to transcribe a
phrase from an epigram of Pomfret, or from a farce
of Buckingham. Out of such abysses of research,
and from this distracting chaos of books, MSS., dia-
ries, charts, pictures, al rnanacks, diagrams, pamphlets,
and epistles, has come forth the commencement of a
history which gives promise of symmetry in its
enormous proportions, and of a nobly sustained and
sonorous eloquence in its treatment. Of the sym-
metry, however, we can scarcely speak otherwise than
in the language of conjecture, judging it as we do ex
pede Herculem—the narrative opening with the Ac-
cession of James 11., and the two volumes before us
closing with the Accession of William 111. Of the
eloquence;on the contrary, we can speak from the ful-
ness of a rare and memorable experience. The annals
of the reign of the last Roman Catholic Sovereign of
England are written in periods worthy of so eminent
a rhetorician. Mr. Macaulay has here coincided
practically in the opinion expressed by his most
recent panegyrist :

" Wit charms the fancy, wisdom guides the sense ;
To make men nobler—that is eloquence.
King Arthur, V. 15.
And to demonstrate at once that the couplet is appli-
cable to our historian even in the quality which
might be least expected, we may adduce numerous
instances in which his sarcasm is either mellowed into
dry humour or crystallized into wit. In such a vein he
describes the Puritan coffee-houses (I. 370.), " where
no oath was heard, and where lank haired men dis-
cussed election and reprobation through their noses ;"
or, while recounting the manner in which these same
Puritans were quartered on the inhabitants of the me-
tropolis, he says (I. 149.) that "the wealthy citizens
grudged nothing to a red coat, and were indeed so
liberal of their best wine, that warlike saints were
sometimes seen in a condition not very honourable
either to their religious or to their military character."
Again, take his mention of the scholarship of the pro-
vincial Cavaliers, (I. 393.) " An esquire passed
among his neighbours for a great scholar, if
Hudibras, and Baker's Chronicle, Tarlton's Jests,
and the Seven Champions of Christendom, lay
in his hall window among the fishing-rods
and fowling-pieces." Or, where after record-
ing the uproar of the slaughter at Sedgemoer,
between the belligerent forces of Monmouth and
Churchill, he writes thus (I. 610-)—" Feversham had
been awakened by the firing, had got out of bed, had
adjusted his cravat, had looked at himself well in the
glass, and had come to see what his men were doing."
Or, what he says of Lawrence Hyde, the second son
(I. 254,)
of Chancellor Clarendon, " The clergy
especially looked upon him as their own man,
and extended to his foibles an indulgence of
which, to say the truth, he stood in
some need ; for he drank deep ; and when
he was in a rage—and he very often was in a rage_
he swore like a porter." Alluding again to the Eng-
lish esquire of the seventeenth century, he says in the
same felicitous tone, half-comic, half-serious (I. 322)
—" He knew the genealogies and coats of arms
of all his neighbours, and could tell which of them
had assumed supporters without any right, and which
of them was so unfortunate as to be great grandsons
of aldermen." Ridiculing the exquisites of the same
epoch, he observes in a congenial mood (I. 400) :
The new breed of wits and fine zentlemen never
opened their mouths without uttering ribaldry of
which a porter would now be ashamed, and without
calling on their Maker to curse them, sink them,
confound them, blast them, and damn them* Inci-
we shall, in the course of our
dentally, however,
remarks, show that, besides an occasional grotesque-
ness of diction the historical writings of Mr. Ma-
caulay are characterised by a variety of far loftier
excellences. Nevertheless, even as a rhetorician, it
is possible sometimes to detect him tripping : as
where he tortures a fine Saxon sentence into a
construction of awkward Latinity (I.
45) ;—" While
the Government of the Tudors was in its
highest vigour, took place an event which has
coloured the destinies of all Christian nations,
and in an e,pc.ciatly manner the destinies of Eng-
land?' Nor can we absolve him from the casual
vice of pedantry, whether in syntax or in punctua-

tion, saying, as he does, somewhat affectedly, "yet a
,eve months ; and the quiet village of Todding:on,"
.',:c. (I. G3O), or recounting with evil affeetltion the
eapture of Rumhold (I. .SGG.) tits—' He dcferlded
itnself de=sperately, and would have cut his way
hrough them had not they hainstringed his horse."
Objections so minute would doubtless savour too
much of hypercriticism; but that, regarding Mr.
Macaulay as one who has ~]ready assumed his posi-
tion as a classic by the side of Burke, of Swift, and
of Gibbon, we would see blemiQhes 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 tnannerisms : ha designates
by the same stereotyped epithet a King, a Chancellor,
and a body of soldiers (1. 607.), the troops of Fever-
sham are " the wicked army" (C. 449), Jeffreys is
"the wicked judge," and (I. 661) James 11. is " the
wicked king." With a more reprehensible inadvert-
ency, Mr. Macaulay has penned this reflection (I. 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 I 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 he
compatible with a liberty of discussion and of indi-
vidual action never before known ; how from the
1 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
bad 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 imperisheble 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, by 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-
tion, 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 (I. 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
strength to themselves, even from the hands of our
most despotic sovereigns. It was thus that Magna
Charta was wrung from John upon Runnymede,
that the Petition :of Right 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 Engiand ;" his
scorn of the affected sanctity of the Precisians (I.
i 63) 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 thel laugeted,
with which those fanatics were subsequently
og
rh lreeso me,
under such soubriquets
tamdmirable—feli-
and Zeal-of-the-Land Busy,
are As to the
citous in every shred of their treatment.
ithroughout these
skill with which Mr. Macau az,
as Tribulation
the narrative, we need only
ters in the course of .
mention of James 1.,
direct attention to his
volumes, interpolates sketches f historical charac-
ters
to
' slobbering, shedding unmanly
who, he says
th® world stammering,
(I. 74), ". exhibited royalty
at a drawn sword, and talking in
of buffoon and ofpeda-
gogue
.of a
tears,t
ho s
t 3, tremblingistyle
alternately
Oates (I. 483), with his short neck, his legs uneven
:" or to his limning
. the notorious Titus

as those of a badger, his forehead low as that of a
baboon, his purple cheeks, zed his monstreus length
oi' chin," diselosing, in short, "those hideous feature,
oe v:iiich viilany seemed to be written by the hand e!
God." Subsequently his delineation of the chericters
of Halifax, of Clarendon, of Marlborough, of Jef-
freys, and of Mac Callum More may be classed among
the most successful achievements of a pen by no
means habituated to failure. 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. dacaulay has
revealed his genius in its full vigour. We know
nothing more eloquent than this in the language. It
sp2aks with a serene but sorrowful voice to the heart's
core. We are not ashamed to confess that it deeply
touched our sensibilities during the perusal. That
temperament would be frigid indeed that could read
it unagitated by emotions of sympathy. It is the
ebullition of a long-cherished sentiment—a sentiment
of tenderness for that " exquisite urbanity" which in
the Merry Monarch had so often proved " 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
‘va3James, 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-
ments 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. Macaulay
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 be
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
Herodotus 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-
rendi. 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
befbre 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 Car well, 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 encyclopredic.in-
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 (I. 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 healths "
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 (1. 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
e .
s
the one here introduced to the notice of our rers
The retrospect is at once topographical, statistical,
sanitary, literary, and—in the largest seasesofwtibtehexa-
pression—popular. After presenting us
h
census of the population anterior to t
way glances at
e Revolution
and the final settlement, Mr.
the financial wealth of the couaMtraaq ;a at the propor-
tionate distribution of propert -fis be wages ob.
bothtiis agricultural and
tailed by the industrial classes,
of the principal
manufacturing ; and at h
cities such as Bristol, Nortwiech, .Kork,
,Ebxeter, Wor-
cester, Nottingham, Gloucnester, Sprews ury, and the
amusing portrait of the
metropolis.
country gentleman anglvoefs thea age of the Stuarts (I.
321), " his wife and daughter being, in tastes and
acquirements, below a housekeeper or a still-room
g
maid of the present day,—stitching and spinning,
brewing gooseberry wine, curing tnarygolds, and
making the crust for the venison pasty." He sketches
with the same humourous touch the rural parson of
the same epoch g
(1. 328), a poor starveling of a di-
vine, who, though permitted to dine with
the family,
might fill himself with the corn beef and the
carrots, but as soon as the tarts and cheesecakes made
their appearance was compelled to quit his seat and
stand aloof until summoned to re turn thanks for the
repast from it great part of which he had been ex-
cluded." Further on he indulges in an admirable
delineation of the state of the capital, from the do-
mestic buildings to the shop-signs, from the coffee-
houses 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