The Sun. — 1862-01-29 (London, England)

LITPR.I7URE.  Lives of Lord Castlereagh. and Sir Charles ~tervart. From original papers. By Sir Archibald Alison, Bart., author of " history of Europe," B.sc.". 3 vols. Blackwood. Few men have devoted more time and labour to the study of the great. struggle which desolated Europe at the commencement of this century than Sir Archibald Alison. To write the history of Europe during the eventful years that intervened between 1789 and 1815 was no easy task. It was a record of men cast in a Titanic mould, of statesmen and soldiers beside of whom the celebrities of recent:date seem men of common stature—of incidents which might make us fancy that the wand of Harlequin had passed over the pages of history and transformed them into a chapter of chivalric romance. It is difficult for the reader of the present day, when English supremacy is secure on land and sea, and the only European wars he has known have begun and ended in a single campaign, to realise the desperate nature of that protracted struggle which extended over 20 years, and cost Europe such an amount of blood and treasure that the most moderate calculations appear almost fabulous. To pourtray faithfully the events of such a time, to draw accurately the leading spirits of that stormy age, demands no common skill, and though it is an often-told tale, it is one that will not lose its vivid interest for many generations. Sir Archibald Alison has invested his work with the character of a history rather than a biography. He justly observes, in his prefatory remarks, that the lives of such men as the two eminent brothers who are his subjects are inseparable from the great public events in which they bore a part. Sir Archibald's merits as an historian are well established, and therefore there is little need to discuss the abilities he has brought to so arduous an undertaking. As a biographer he is not altogether impartial, but he has, perhaps, purposely assumed the character of a partisan in order to counteract the prejudices which depreciated the merits and capacities of one who, whatever his errors, was certainly no common statesman, It was Lord Castlereagh's misfortune, in spite of enlarged views and some liberal tendencies, to be continually ranged on the unpopular side. His life, as his biographer confesses, was engaged in the policy of reprdsione Much may be forgiven even in these days of enlightenment to the Minister in whose time the Irish rebels could gravely contemplate the murder of every Orangeman and the establishment of an Hibernian Republic; who formed one of the doomed Administration, whose Cabinet dinner narrowly escaped becoming a Bermecide feast by the discovery of Thistlewood's conspiracy; who lived in an epoch when, not the national supremacy, but the national existence was at stake, when treaties were not quite so quickly arranged as at Villafranca, and when certainly neither wars nor revolutions were made with rosewater. Yet his historian asserts that such a policy was foreign to his character. "So far," he says, from having been the supporter of tyranny and the friend of arbitrary government, he was throughout life the strongest and most determined, as well as successful opponent of both. He resisted oppression with equal vigour whether it appeared in the form of a dominant Protestant oligarchy in Ireland, of a tyrannical mob committee in England, of an imperial despot in France, of an encroaching Asiatic autocrat in Poland, or of a conclave of arbitrary sovereigns at Laybach. His ruling principle was not the support of any one party, or the steadfast resistance to another, but the prosecution of what he deemed the public interest, irrespective of the wishes of any man or body of men." It was this inflexibility which, in his biographer's opinion, explains his unpopularity. The parties whose support: had, in his mind, been second to the general welfare, became his bitter antagonists, and that these were varied and numerous, the following extract will show :