It is pretty plainly hinted that the Edinburgh reviewer will receive his reward below! All this is very small and cheap. It would be neither more difficult nor less true, for others to say of the Quarterly Review as much as Captain M. has said of the Edinburgh, nor for us to assert, that if the Edinburgh reviewer be so consigned, he need not be surprised to find himself in company with a certain person bearing her Majesty's commission. But we have no wish to say any thing of the kind, and we hope better things of both but it is very disgusting to see with what readiness and self-complacency these exclusive moralists and religionists

:

'Presume heaven's bolts to throw,

And deal damnation round the land,
On each they judge its foe.'

Or rather their own foe,-for after all that is the secret!

In the mean time, these things speak volumes. The Tories in their convulsive struggles for existence, have clung to the Church; and, as political corruption is next of kin to spiritual, the Church has felt the link of nature draw it, and has fraternized with them at once. And now-whoever opposes Tory ascendency is seditious; whoever attacks the corruptions of the Church, and wishes for a purer form of Christianity, is an infidel! Can there be any stronger proof of the most childish ignorance of human nature-of the most rooted hatred to the right of private judgment? Let the people of England look to it! Were these men in possession of unmolested power, sedition and infidelity, now mere words, would very speedily become things; aye, and be acted upon as such. In the hands of such men as these it is impossible that civil or religious liberty should ever be held sacred. Again we say, let the people of England look to this!

It is true, that Toryism in its latest struggles has occasionally put on such shows of liberality and justice as have almost made it lovely. They are fleeting all, though fair; like the varying colors of the expiring dolphin, which render the rapacious monster beautiful in death.

Captain Marryat charges the Edinburgh reviewer with want of tact; he has shown, we apprehend, much greater want of it himself; in confessing, in the first place, that every paragraph in his work was written after great consideration; and, secondly, that the whole was intended to answer a preconcerted purpose: two admissions which, coupled together, entirely destroy the little authority that might otherwise attach to his work. It reminds us of a stanza in that celebrated composition the Devil's Walk.

'Down the river did glide, with wind and tide,
A pig with vast celerity,

And the devil grinned, for he saw all the while
How it cut its own throat, and he thought with a smile,
Of England's commercial prosperity!'

Had this stanza been written recently, the last line might have

run

Of Captain Marryat's Diary!''

The sum of the whole is this. In one point Captain Marryat may have succeeded to his wish, that is, in convincing those who are not capable of judging for themselves. In every other, we conceive that he has failed. We consider some of his facts as very questionable; but, even granting them all, they do not bear out his inferences. He has not proved that a democratic form of government is cæteris paribus-worse than any other. He has not, therefore, done 'serious injury to the cause of democracy.' And, granting that he had proved democracy to be bad, he has not proved that Toryism is better. He has not, therefore, as'sisted the cause of conservatism.' In our minds, indeed, the same conclusion might have been built on far more general grounds; for the man who avowedly leaves his impartiality behind him, while he proceeds to form his judgment, can never be entitled to our confidence on any matter of opinion.

One word to the reader and we have done. Have you never been struck by the strong internal evidence in the writings of high Churchmen and Tories, that they consider the cause of evangelical religion, and that of the voluntary system, to be one. Never do they aim a blow at the one, without immediately repeating it at the other; a sufficient proof, we think, that there exists even in their minds a latent conviction, that the two must stand or fall together. Their opposition to both can arise from one of two causes only; and either is sufficient for our purpose. It must proceed, either from an intelligent dislike to evangelical religion-the religion of Christ and his evangelists-as such, and to the voluntary system as a necessary deduction from it; or, from an utter ignorance of the nature and the modes of acting, of that religion and that system which they venture to impugn.

289

Art. IV. Memoirs of the Court of England during the Reign of the Stuarts, including the Protectorate. By JOHN HENEAGE JESSE.

Two vols. 8vo. London: Bentley. 1840.

IT T is somewhat mortifying, but not wholly uninstructive, to observe the superficial and confused knowledge of English history, which prevails even amongst the better informed classes of our countrymen. To say nothing of remote things, of the druidical and Saxon age, or even of the centuries which intervened from the Norman Conquest to the establishment of the Tudor race, this remark holds good in relation to the comparatively modern period to which the volumes before us refer. Certain events stand out prominently, and are recognized by all; every man knows that Charles the First was opposed by his parliament, that the plea of liberty was raised on the one side and that of prerogative on the other, that hostile armies met on English ground, where brother fought against brother, and father against son, that the monarch was at length worsted, his person seized, and by open adjudication assigned to the block. Every English youth can talk of the royalists and the roundheads, can glory in the chivalry of the one, or exult in the puritanic severity and martial prowess of the other. These are things to be met with everywhere and on any day, and to a hasty observer it may in consequence appear, that a creditable portion of historical information is current amongst the people. But the illusion soon vanishes, and the diligent inquirer discovers only crude, meagre, undigested, and partizan views of history. The mere outline of past events is traced,-the filling up is wholly wanting. The broad, palpable, and coarse are known; what is physical is apprehended; the mere outward and visible man is seen; but the nicer shades of character distinguishing individuals or parties, the latent influences which work unseen, and are discovered only by their results, the strange combinations of good and evil which appertain to all alike, the accumulative forces which pressed upon the particular period, and determined mainly its character, these and a hundred other things are rarely apprehended or even thought of, and the popular mind, therefore, possesses only dark and impalpable views of the period in question.

Let the names of Charles and Cromwell be obliterated, let the battles of Marston Moor and Naseby be forgotten, let the execution of the king, and the temporary establishment of a Commonwealth be lost sight of, and the whole field of vision will present little that is definite and tangible to the English mind. There will still, indeed, be retained a general impression, derived from the report of parliamentary discussions, high minded patriotism,

VOL. VII.

X

and deep intriguing tyranny; but it will be so undefined and cloudlike as to exert no perceptible influence on the national judgment. The civil strife with all its premonitory and consequent facts, the momentous interests it involved, the developments of character it supplied, its influence on our habits, passions, and institutions; all these would, in such case, be passed over-as they actually are for the most part-with a few vague generalities, expressive of praise or censure, of sympathy or regret. This is not as it should be, and we rejoice in every judicious effort to supply the deficiency. Happily we are not without hopeful symptoms of a better era. A new spirit has come over our historical literature. Men of diligent research and of painstaking accuracy, superior to past prejudices, and with every needful intellectual endowment, have devoted themselves to the investigation of historical documents, and the result has been the clearing up of many difficulties, and the substitution of plain realities for the conjectures of imagination and the romance of party zeal.

Two classes of publications are needed for the correction of the evil to which we have adverted, and we rejoice to believe that both are in the course of being supplied. Their merits, in an intellectual point of view, are very diverse, but he will deserve well of his countrymen, and will contribute not a little to the purification of our political ethics, and the advancement of our social welfare, who contributes either. The great difficulty to be mastered is the bringing ourselves into immediate, life-like and sympathetic union with the past; to see the men of a former day as they appeared to the contemporaries amongst whom they walked and with whom they acted, fresh and living, with the impulses of the hour upon them, and the emotions springing thence beaming on their countenances. It is not at a levee that the characters of men are to be learnt, nor can the spirit and impersonation of a former age be traced out by an investigation, however minute and laborious, of the public life of a few distinguished men. There is a large void to be filled, and it is not enough that a solitary figure, here and there, should be brought back to retrace its course the whole must be crowded with sentient, moving, stirring beings, actuated by the passions of the day, and engaged in the hearty pursuit of their various and cherished purposes. The ideal must give place to the actual, the vague generality to the collection of individuals, each, in his separate sphere, and with his personal predilections or antipathies moving onward to his appointed goal. Nor are we wanting in materials for such a re-creation of the past. The men and women of a former day, especially those who imprinted a character on their age, yet remain amongst us, and require only to be disinterred."

ransacked treasures of our noble language only wait the bidding

of some magician-some historic Scott-to come forth from dusty folios, or from neglected pamphlets the very spirit of their age, in all the forms and fantastic moods of a forgotten day. Let but the right intellect appear, an intellect at once imaginative and practical, nice in its perceptions, discriminative in its judgment, free to a great extent from the artificial characteristics of the passing generation, and full of sympathy with humanity at large, and we shall soon see the past standing out in real and veritable forms, speaking to us in its own tones, and disclosing with an accuracy which will exclude all doubt, the secret of its achievements and its failures.

Let these materials be supplied, and the philosophic historian will be found at his post to analyze and combine them. Men of calm and searching intellects will not be wanting to investigate the principles of our common nature, to trace out remote and hidden causes, to develop the order which has been maintained amid apparent confusion, and to shed upon the future history of our race, the light of that practical wisdom with which the past is so richly fraught. We have already an earnest of this in "The Constitutional History of England,' and may yet live to see much accomplished. Amid the many cheering indications of the times, we account it by no means the least promising, that our historical literature is in the course of being redeemed from its past disgraceful subjection to party prejudices, that it is beginning to utter an impartial testimony, to measure with evenhanded justice the men of all parties, to render itself, in a word, the handmaid of truth, and the friend of humanity at large.

The volumes now before us, and which have given occasion for these reflections, belong to the former of the two classes of publications we have specified. They are not in some respects what we could wish, yet as indicative of the public taste, and as suited to promote a further cultivation of this department of history, we rejoice in their appearance. They consist of private memoirs and of personal anecdotes, and display commendable diligence in the collection of materials. It occurred to the ' author,' his preface informs us, 'that the private history of the reigns of the Stuarts and of the Protectorate, their families, 'and others intimately connected with the Court,-would present 'a series of agreeable and instructive anecdotes; would furnish 'the means of introducing the reader to the principal personages ' of their day, and of exhibiting the monarch and the statesman ' in their undress; while, at the same time, it would afford an ' insight into human character, and a picture of the manners of 'the age.'

The personages introduced are the members of the Stuart family, with their favorites and courtiers, and the plan pursued is to collect, in a series of biographical notices, the anecdotes