and, having slept during more than a century, was revived by that great stirring of the human mind of France. During thirty years the contest went on which followed the meeting of the National Assembly in both houses of Parliament, in every constituent body, in every social circle. It destroyed administrations, broke up parties, made all government in one part of the empire impossible, and at length brought us to the verge of civil war. Even when the struggle had terminated, the passions to which scarcely possible for any man whose mind was unit had given birth still continued to rage. It was der the influence of those passions to see the events of the years 1687 and 1688 in a perfectly correct light.

on account of his religious opinions; or from any | James the Second, was set at rest by his downfall, idea that those opinions would prevent the discharge of his ordinary duties. He was excluded because he substantially formed a member of a conspiracy or confederation, which had for its avowed object to overset both the established religion and the civil liberties of the nation; and no one can doubt that had the Test Act not passed, both would unquestionably have been sacrificed. It is equally certain that the same precautions were necessary for the protection of the new order of things established at the revolution. It was the men who were dangerous, not the opinions; and at them the measures in question were levelled. While, therefore, we would by no means say One class of politicians, starting from the true that, apart from imminent political dangers, the proposition that the revolution had been a great religious intolerance of the revolution Protestants blessing to our country, arrived at the false conclumight not have led to unjustifiable results, it is sion that no test which the statesmen of the revolution had thought necessary for the protection of quite clear, from Mr. Macaulay's narrative, that our religion and our freedom, could be safely abolthe Test Bill originally, and the safeguards adopt-ished. Another class, starting from the true proped at the revolution, afford not the slightest evi-osition that the disabilities imposed on the Roman dence that it would have done so. These were Catholics had long been productive of nothing but barriers thrown up to exclude an avowed, open mischief, arrived at the false conclusion that there and acknowledged enemy. This and this alone never could have been a time when those disabilities could have been useful and necessary. The had been the policy of Elizabeth. Bacon scornformer fallacy pervaded the speeches of the acute fully denies the contrary imputation. And in the and learned Eldon. The latter was not altogether case of James himself, he was not so much driven without influence even on an intellect so calm and out because he favored Popery, as Popery was philosophical as that of Mackintosh. excluded because it alone, and its adherents, then prompted, maintained, and defended the arbitrary and dark counsels of James. In the penal statutes the nation were not doing homage to an abstract principle. They were not vindicating the purity of the Protestant religion-or placing civil government on a religious basis. They were only defending themselves by an act of ordinary prudence. They had seen their most sacred privileges and their dearest interests menaced by Popery. Irish mercenaries guarded the king; and avowedly only waited the hour of strength to destroy the constitution. The rights of old foundations and corporations were set at nought, and popish priests intruded into the dignities of the church and the universities. If the nation had lost the game, Popery would unquestionably have won it. The nation was triumphant; and Popery only shared, for the time, the usual fate, and, in this instance, deserved fate, of the vanquished.

Perhaps, however, it will be found on examination that we may vindicate the course which was unanimously approved by all the great English statesmen of the seventeenth century, without questioning the wisdom of the course which was unanimously approved by all the great English statesmen of our own time.

Undoubtedly it is an evil that any citizen should be excluded from civil employment on account of his religious opinions; but a choice between evils is sometimes all that is left to human wisdom. A majority must either impose disabilities or submit nation may be placed in such a situation that the to them; and that what would, under ordinary circumstances, be justly condemned as persecution may fall within the bounds of legitimate selfdefence; and such was, in the year 1687, the situation of England.

According to the constitution of the realm, public functionaries, political, judicial, ecclesiasJames possessed the right of naming almost all tical, military, and naval. In the exercise of this right he was not, as our sovereigns now are, under We do not recollect to have met, anywhere, the necessity of acting in confortnity with the adwith so calm and convincing an elucidation of this vice of ministers approved by the House of ComIt was evident therefore that, unless he very important topic, as Mr. Macaulay has fur- mons. nished us with in the passage quoted below were strictly bound by law to bestow office on none which we make our solitary extract, not as an in- but Protestants, it would be in his power to bestow office on none but Roman Catholics. The Roman stance of brilliant composition, but as a clear and Catholics were few in number; and among them unanswerable view of a series of facts, which was not a single man whose services could be serihave been perverted, until very recently, to very ously missed by the commonwealth. The proporintolerant and ignoble party purposes. tion which they bore to the population of England was very much smaller than at present. For at present a constant stream of emigration runs from Ireland to our great towns; but in the seventeenth century there was not even in London an Irish colony. Forty-nine fiftieths of the inhabitants of the kingdom, forty-nine fiftieths of the property of the kingdom, almost all the political, legal, and military ability and knowledge to be found in the kingdom,

It is not easy for any person who, in our time, undertakes to treat of the revolution which overthrew the Stuarts, to preserve with steadiness the happy mean between these two extremes. The question whether members of the Roman Catholic church could be safely admitted to Parliament and to office convulsed our country during the reign of

Even Penn, intemperate and undiscerning as was his zeal for the declaration, seems to have felt that the partiality with which honors and emoluments were heaped on Roman Catholics might not unnaturally excite the jealousy of the nation. He owned that, if the test act were repealed, the Protestants were entitled to an equivalent, and went so far as to suggest several equivalents. During some weeks the word equivalent, then lately imported from France, was in the mouths of all the coffee-house orators; but at length a few pages of keen logic and polished sarcasm, written by Halifax, put an end to these idle projects. One of Penn's schemes was that a law should be passed dividing the patronage of the crown into three equal parts; and that to one only of those parts members of the Church of Rome should be admitted. Even under such an arrangement the members of the Church of Rome would have obtained near twenty times their fair portion of official appointments; and yet there is no reason to believe that even to such an arrangement the king would have consented. But, had he consented, what guarantee could he give that he would adhere to his bargain? The dilemma propounded by Halifax was unanswerable. If laws are binding on you, observe the law which now exists. If laws are not binding on you, it is idle to offer us a law as a security.

were Protestant. Nevertheless the king, under a | a partition of offices; and carefully to reserve for strong infatuation, had determined to use his vast the members of the Church of Rome a portion which patronage as a means of making proselytes. To might have sufficed for them if they had been one be of his church was, in his view, the first of all half instead of one fiftieth part of the nation. One qualifications for office. To be of the national secretary of state, one commissioner of the treasury, church was a positive disqualification. He repro- the secretary at war, the majority of the great digbated, it is true, in language which has been ap- nitaries of the household, the majority of the officers plauded by some credulous friends of religious lib- of the army, are always to be Catholics. Such were erty, the monstrous injustice of that test which the designs of James after his perverse bigotry had excluded a small minority of the nation from public drawn on him a punishment which had appalled the trust; but he was at the same time instituting a whole world. Is it then possible to doubt what his test which excluded the majority. He thought it conduct would have been, if his people, deluded by hard that a man who was a good financier and a the empty name of religious liberty, had suffered loyal subject should be excluded from the post of him to proceed without any check? lord treasurer, merely for being a Papist. But he had himself turned out a lord treasurer, whom he admitted to be a good financier and a loyal subject, merely for being a Protestant. He had repeatedly and distinctly declared his resolution never to put the white staff in the hands of any heretic. With many other great offices of state he had dealt in the same way. Already the lord president, the lord privy seal, the lord chamberlain, the groom of the stole, the first lord of the treasury, a secretary of state, the lord high commissioner of Scotland, the chancellor of Scotland, the secretary of Scotland, were, or pretended to be, Roman Catholics. Most of these functionaries had been bred churchmen, and had been guilty of apostasy, open or secret, in order to obtain or to keep their high places. Every Protestant who still held an important post in the government held it in constant uncertainty and fear. It would be endless to recount the situations of a lower rank which were filled by the favored class. Roman Catholics already swarmed in every department of the public service. They were lords lieutenants, deputy lieutenants, judges, justices of the peace, commissioners of the customs, envoys to foreign courts, colonels of regiments, governors of fortresses. The share which in a few months they had obtained of the temporal patronage of the crown, was much more than ten times as great as they would have It is clear, therefore, that the point at issue was had under an impartial system. Yet this was not not whether secular offices should be thrown open the worst. They were made rulers of the Church to all sects indifferently. While James was king of England. Men who had assured the king that it was inevitable that there should be exclusion; they held his faith, sat in the high commission; and the only question was who should be excluded? and exercised supréme jurisdiction in spiritual -Papists or Protestants, the few or the many, a things over all the prelates and priests of the estab-hundred thousand Englishmen or five millions. lished religion. Ecclesiastical benefices of great We look on this passage as one of very grave dignity had been bestowed, some on avowed and lasting importance, as far as the example of Papists, and some on half concealed Papists. And those times is of moment in our own. Indeed, the principle of religious toleration actually made progress under James, as far as the merely religious element was concerned. Puritanism did by no means flame so high in England at that time as it did this side the border; and there really seems little reason to believe that, if the nation could have felt satisfied that neither the church establishment nor freedom of person and conscience would have been endangered by the repeal of the test, there How obstinately James was determined to bestow would have been any deep resistance, on religious on the members of his own church a share of patron- grounds, against the admission of Roman Catholics age altogether out of proportion to their numbers to secular power. That very singular negotiation and importance, is proved by the instructions which, in exile and old age, he drew up for the guidance of his son. It is impossible to read, without mingled pity and derision, those effusions of a mind on which all the discipline of experience and adversity had been exhausted in vain. The Pretender is advised, if ever he should reign in England, to make

all this had been done while the laws against

Popery were still unrepealed-and while James had still a strong interest in affecting respect for the rights of conscience. What then was his conduct likely to be, if his subjects consented to free him, by a legislative act, from even the shadow of restraint? Is it possible to doubt that Protestants would have been as effectually excluded from employment, by a strictly legal use of the royal prerogative, as ever Roman Catholics had been by act

of Parliament ?

with the dissenters, on the part both of James and the Church of England, which Mr. Macaulay describes with so much spirit, and the subsequent cordiality with which the church and 'the dissenters coöperated at the trial of the bishops, certainly evince far more liberality on the part of both the

Episcopalian and the dissenting clergy of that day, than many of their descendants could boast of.

Perhaps the most original and brilliant part of the whole work, is the author's description of the character, views, and opinions of King William; and his estimate of the effects of that character and those views on the immediate condition and future fortunes of England. Nothing more powerful in writing, more discriminating in judgment, or more masterly in comprehensive analysis, is to be found in English history. Even here, Mr. Macaulay's eye for the picturesque has not failed him; and there is a singular felicity in the contrast between his character of William and that which he had drawn of James. The picture is, as far as we can judge, in no respect overdrawn or flattered; but nothing could be more strongly or happily marked than the far-sighted, intellectual, energetic character of the one, when set off as a foil to the imbecility, injustice, and indecision of the other.

the highest degree felicitous. They saved this nation, by their happy coincidence, from the necessity of resolving many difficult questions, in extricating which too many states and commonwealths have "found no end." He was not a conqueror, for he came by invitation. He was not a creature of the hour, for he dictated his own terms. He was not a usurper or an upstart, for his position was but a step higher, and his time a few years earlier, than the strict course of succession would have made them; yet he did not continue the dynasty, and he broke once and forever that ill-twisted cord on which depended

The right divine of kings to govern wrong.

vant only of the constitution.

He was not an alien to our nation or our blood, for he was doubly connected with the royal line of England; and yet he was so thoroughly removed from the provincialisms of English party-so thoroughly European in his statesmanship and his views, The account of the origin and progress of the that all grades of rank, and men of all shades of intrigue, for such it was, which brought William political opinion, felt that in welcoming him they to our shores, is one of the most elaborate and most gave no triumph to an adversary. Thus he occuvaluable parts of the volume before us. Mr. Mac-pied at once that position of independent and constiaulay had access to many sources of information on tutional isolation of which the juncture of the times this subject, which collectively no other writer has stood so much in need, and was enabled to hold the ever probably enjoyed, and he has probably thrown balance even between contending factions, as the all the light on it which it is now capable of receiv-arbiter of their differences, while he was the sering. The result of the narrative is to show how completely the destinies, not of this country only, but All this was greatly aided by the nature of his of Europe, hung on the will of one man-and that personal ambition. He was the more gladly subman not a mighty monarch, but the prince of a mitted to, and, indeed, welcomed by the nation at third-rate territory. We found in this account two large, that the crown of England was not a prize things of which we had not been so distinctly aware at which he was too eager to grasp;-and that he before. The first was the object which William made it evident that, except with the goodwill of had in his English enterprise. The European pol- his future subjects, and on terms honorable to himicy of William is familiar to everybody. But we self, he had no desire to rule over them. Nor was certainly never saw it so clearly explained else there any affectation in this. It would not have where, how entirely subordinate the English throne aided the schemes he had really at heart, to have was, in the mind of the Prince of Orange, to his succeeded to the tedious task of controlling a murgreat European schemes; or how completely he muring and unwilling nation, and maintaining an regarded it as a mere rampart constructed against alien sceptre by the swords of mercenaries. That the power and the encroachments of France. Our would have infused no additional strength into the author develops this view in the most convincing great Protestant alliance of Europe. It would, on manner; and it serves to explain much in William's the contrary, have proved a new source of anxiety subsequent conduct, which must otherwise appear and weakness. Therefore it was that he would not inconsistent or unintelligible-however little grati-strike the blow, until he was sure the design was fying the explanation may be to our national pride. It is not, we confess, without some regret that we acknowledge the truth of this view of the "great and good King William." We had supposed him more of a fellow-countryman than he ever was, or wished to be. Well and nobly as he discharged the duties of sovereignty in the land which adopted him, his heart evidently never naturalized itself to his English home; and in his inmost soul he cursed our politics, our sports, and our climate to the last. He was in fact transplanted too late in life to take kindly to our soil; but he came among us with high views and lofty ends; and how these were carried out, we may safely predict has never yet been told as Mr. Macaulay will tell us in his next volume.

Indeed, the accidental combination of circumstances which placed William on the throne was in

ripe; and that he waited with such singular sagacity till the appointed time-resisting the solicitations of too eager friends, and the lures of enticing oppor tunity. He had no wish for the kingdom unless he acquired it under circumstances which should leave him leisure, while they gave him power, to use all the energies of the ancient monarchy he represented, in defence and furtherance of his great scheme of European policy.

While thus the Prince of Orange, in ascending the throne of England, had no local interests to serve, or wrongs to avenge, he saved us also from that worst result of revolutions, the dislodgment of those rude but strong corner-stones on which the foundations of the constitution were built. For, let men theorize as they may, nothing is clearer by experience than that a free constitution cannot be

renounced philosophy, and Canning letters-and where Pitt and Fox poured forth, with more than Grecian inspiration, the exhaustless treasury of their thoughts. It was then that the House of Commons began, in fact, to reign; and from these beginnings, by slow and gradual steps, has it become the model on which (at present at how great a distance!) almost every free representative assembly in the world has since been formed.

The gradual ascendancy of the House of Commons will, we doubt not, be more graphically portrayed in Mr. Macaulay's future volumes than it has ever been before. But none can doubt that it was materially indebted to the personal position, character, and temperament of William the Third, for the first consolidation of its power.

safely or certainly constructed on a month's or a year's warning; nor will men ever regard with the same respect, or defend with the same jealousy, the new-fledged code of yesterday, as that which is made up of customs which are entwined round our earliest recollections, and are strong in the strongest of human impulses the force of habit. Persons who see how ancient laws, too narrow for the growth of society, cling, nevertheless, round the old pillars of the state with resisting tenacity, and who find the path of reform far more upward and difficult than a philosopher might think it ought to be, are frequently too much inclined to despise and overlook that great engine of civil government, antiquity. On the contrary, we have learned by the fate of other countries, to look on it as our greatest good fortune, that, in our history, from its earliest dawn, Mr. Macaulay has done much to redeem the we have never been compelled to rebuild a shattered character of William from the impression of coldor uprooted constitution. Its growth has been spon-ness and want of feeling, which has generally been taneous. It has from time to time cast off its super-prevalent regarding him. Not that after all, unfluous or contracted limbs, as crustaceous animals less we had been Dutchmen, he was, even by our do their shells, by its own internal energy; not only historian's account of him, exactly the companion without its identity being impaired, but with the we should have chosen. It does, however, appear nation's old ancestral pride in the fabric deepened that warm fires burnt beneath the frigid and phlegand enlarged under each renovating effort. And matic exterior; and his letters to Bentinck, some though no doubt the gravitating principle which of which are referred to in the text, betoken a nakeeps ancient customs firmly fixed on our English ture not unfrequently combined with strength and soil, does also retard the chariot-wheels of improve- resolution-a mind so jealous of its softer moods, ment, and compels many measures of reformation, as never to allow them to be suspected by the simple and plain in themselves, to convulse and world, devouring its sorrows, and stifling its joys, agitate the whole civil system before they can be as weaknesses not to be disclosed but to ears and finally engrafted on it, yet it also ensures that, when hearts the most familiar. To strangers he cerfairly incorporated with the constitution, they will tainly was unattractive, and distant even to his acquire at once stability from its age, while they associates; but we must remember, he lived surcontribute strength and vitality to its functions.rounded by men he could not trust. In his inmost From this cause it is that, while we have so often seen, on the continent, a constitution which was the idol and deity of one day trampled upon the next, the storm of revolution has beaten with so innocuous a surge on our rock-bound island.

heart, when the barriers were once broken, he seems to have been simple, cordial, and joyous, fond of field sports and gardening, and easily amused. The best and generally the least known trait of his more domestic life is the unquestionable attachment with which he inspired his wife. He had no external or superficial advantages, which were likely to strike the eye, or charm the fancy of a woman; and the devotion Mary felt for him, must have had its anchor in the unfathomed depths of a character, of which she had learned more, and which she had read more truly, than the pub

Now the peculiar position of William left him at liberty, as it induced him, to allow the native vigor of the English constitution to take the required precautions for its own future integrity. Nothing could be more imposing to the new king, the exiled monarch, and all Europe, than the decent gravity with which Parliament proceeded, in that singular crisis, to search the records for pre-lic. cedents! Such was the silent homage which, even in that strange conjecture, they paid to the constitution; implying that, so far from the established order of things being subverted or shaken, the case was probably one which the law had foreseen and provided for. Then arose-built on the solid though unformed masonry of their ancestors -the noblest organ of government which the world ever saw-the theatre of profoundest statesmanship, of learning, law, eloquence, and wit, which, from that auspicious time till now, has absorbed the flower of the rank, genius, power, and wealth of Britain-where the fascinating St. John charmed his hearers into forgetfulness of his life by the magic of his tongue-for which "truant Wyndham every muse gave o'er"-for which Burke

We have endeavored, in the preceding pages, as far as our limited space for so large a field would permit, to illustrate some of the more striking and characteristic features of our author. Of course we are far from saying that, in details, there must not be points here and there on which his work may not be open to just remark, or difference of opinion; but we are satisfied, that in the completeness and correctness of the basis of his facts, and the completeness and correctness of the inferences which he has drawn, he has given a new impulse and direction to the public mind. And the hearty, healthful spirit he has breathed into the annals of the past-the honest glow of pride which he alike feels and inspires for patriotism and liberty-the strong arm of scorn with which

he has dashed aside the false philosophy and hol- | pected to go down! We might sweep them all

low subserviency of former writers, and the truthful beauty and spirit which his unrivalled rhetoric has cast over a narrative of sober fact, have well entitled him to the popularity he has commanded, and would have atoned for faults far more grave than the most censorious reader has yet imputed to him.

away with one contemptuous paragraph from a hand equally opposed to Mr. Macaulay in politics, but far too candid and too generous to resort to such warfare.

66

"We shall not," (says Blackwood, in a late article, in which we may without offence hint that we trace the hand of another deservedly eminent historian of the day, and which breathes a spirit of generous candor,) we shall not, in treating of the merits of this very remarkable production, adopt the not uncommon practice of reviewers on such occasions. We shall not pretend to be better informed on the details of the subject than the author. We shall not set up the reading of a few weeks or months against the study of half a lifetime. We shall not imitate certain critics who look at the bottom of the pages for the authorities of the author, and having got the clue to the requisite information, proceed to examine with the utmost minuteness every particular of his narrative, and make in consequence a vast display of knowledge wholly derived from the reading which he has suggested. We shall not be so deluded as to suppose we have made a great discovery in biography, because we have ascertained that some Lady Caroline of the last generation was born on the 7th October, 1674, instead of the 8th February, 1675, as the historian, with shameful negligence, has affirmed; nor shall we take credit to ourselves for a journey down to Hampshire to consult the parish register on the subject. As little shall we in future accuse Macaulay of inaccuracy in describing battles, because on referring, without mentioning it, to the military authorities he has quoted, and the page he has referred to, we have discovered that at some battle, as Malplaquet, Lottum's men stood on the right of the Prince of Orange, when he says they stood on the left; or that Marlborough dined on a certain day at one o'clock, when in point of fact he did not sit down, as is proved by incontestable authority, till half-past two. We shall leave such minute and Lilliputian criticisms to the minute and Lilliputian minds by whom alone they are ever made. Mr. Macaulay can afford to smile at all reviewers who affect to possess more than his own gigantic stores of information."

Such is this great national work-as our countrymen have already pronounced it to be. The loud, clear voice of impartial fame has sounded her award; and it will stand, without appeal, as long as Englishmen regard their past history and love the constitution of which he tells. From one quarter only--and that a quarter of which we expected, and which perhaps wished for itself, better things—has the melancholy wailing of disappointed jealousy been heard. The public naturally looked with interest for the notice of Mr. Macaulay's History in the "Quarterly Review." The notice had not long appeared when it was observed, with equal wit and truth, that the writer of it, in attempting murder, had committed suicide. We have doubted whether we should add a word in illustration of a judgment, in which the public has shown, through almost all its representatives, that it cordially agrees. It has never been our practice to fall foul of brother critics in our common walk; and if one of our fraternity gives way to occasional eccentricity, and executes strange or disagreeable gambols on the path, we generally find that his own sense of propriety, or the silence of his companions, is check enough speedily to restore his balance. Nor do we mean in this instance to follow the critic to whom we refer through his forlorn and labored journey, the more especially as no one doubts the point from which it started, or the goal it had in view. That a journal of deserved name and reputation should announce of these volumes, propositions so openly contradictory as that, on the one hand, their author has produced no new facts and discovered no new materials and that, on the other, he has made the facts of English history "as fabulous as his Lays' do those of Roman tradition!"-betrays, it is true, some rankling wound behind. This, however, would not have provoked our notice; nor should we have written a sentence to refute the theory that Sir Walter Scott's historical novels were the wild fire that led Mr. Macaulay astray. All this the public were quite able to appreciate, and have appreciated, at exactly its true value. But his merits have been questioned in a department which may, perhaps, call for, or at least excuse, some remark. A show has been made of bringing the combat to closer quarters, of grappling with small facts, and detecting great misstatements in very little matters. It is with very tiny pebbles indeed that this strippling comes forth to do battle with the giant. Whether this man's father was a knight or a baronet-whether that man was a whig or a It is said, that in the anecdote of Francis, who tory-whether Lord Peterborough did or did not was executed for the murder of Dangerfield, Mr. write a sermon at sea-these, and such as these, Macaulay was not justified in calling Francis a are the weapons before which Mr. Macaulay is ex-tory gentleman. But Mr. Macaulay was very

Nothing could have been more happily expressed by anticipation, to characterize the critique which made its appearance on the same day with these just and honorable sentences.

Paying, however, more regard to the quarter from which the missiles are ostensibly launched, than to their own weight or calibre, we mean to spend a few sentences-and they shall be very few-in showing that the enemy has not even loaded with the small shot he professed to employ, and that all this sound and thunder is but a volley of blank cartridge after all.

Let us take him ad aperturam.