those popular leaders of the House of Commons who were not among the Thirty; and, if our view of the measure be correct, they were precisely the people who had good reason to grumble. They were precisely the people whose activity and whose influence the new Council was intended to destroy.

nistration ever known, and that he was afterwards a principal member of the most profligate Opposition ever known. It is certain that, in power he did not scruple to violate the great fundamental principle of the Constitution, in order to exalt the Catholics, and that, out of power, he did not scruple to violate every principle of justice, in order to destroy them. There were in that age some honest men, such as William Penn, who valued toleration so highly that they would willingly have seen it established even by an illegal exertion of

But there was very soon an end of the bright hopes and loud applauses with which the publication of this scheme had been hailed. The perfidious levity of the King and the ambition of the chiefs of parties produced the instant, entire, and irremediable the prerogative. failure of a plan which nothing but firmness, public spirit, and self-denial, on the part of all concerned in it could conduct to a happy issue. Even before the project was divulged, its author had already found reason to apprehend that it would fail. Considerable difficulty was experienced in framing the list of counsellors. There were two men in particular about whom the King and Temple could not agree, two men deeply tainted with the vices common to the English statesmen of that age, but unrivalled in talents, address, and influence. These were the Earl of Shaftesbury, and George Savile Viscount Halifax.

It was a favourite exercise among the Greek sophists to write panegyrics on characters proverbial for depravity. One professor of rhetoric sent to Isocrates a panegyric on Busiris; and Isocrates himself wrote another which has come down to us. It is, we presume, from an ambition of the same kind that some writers have lately shown a disposition to eulogise Shaftesbury. But the attempt is vain. The charges against him rest on evidence not to be invalidated by any arguments which human wit can devise, or by any information which may be found in old trunks and escrutoires.

It is certain that, just before the Restoration, he declared to the Regicides that he would be damned, body and soul, rather than suffer a hair of their heads to be hurt, and that, just after the Restoration, he was one of the judges who sentenced them to death. It is certain that he was a principal member of the most profligate Admi

There were many

honest men who dreaded arbitrary
power so much that, on account of the
alliance between Popery and arbitrary
power, they were disposed to grant no
toleration to Papists. On both those
classes we look with indulgence, though
we think both in the wrong. But Shaftes-
bury belonged to neither class. He
united all that was worst in both. From
the misguided friends of toleration he
borrowed their contempt for the Con-
stitution, and from the misguided friends
of civil liberty their contempt for the
rights of conscience. We never can
admit that his conduct as a member of
the Cabal was redeemed by his conduct
as a leader of Opposition. On the
contrary, his life was such that every
part of it, as if by a skilful contrivance,
reflects infamy on every other.
should never have known how aban-
doned a prostitute he was in place, if
we had not known how desperate an
incendiary he was out of it. To judge
of him fairly, we must bear in mind that
the Shaftesbury who, in office, was the
chief author of the Declaration of In-
dulgence, was the same Shaftesbury
who, out of office, excited and kept up
the savage hatred of the rabble of Lon-
don against the very class to whom that
Declaration of Indulgence was intended
to give illegal relief.

We

It is amusing to see the excuses that are made for him. We will give two specimens. It is acknowledged that he was one of the Ministry which made the alliance with France against Holland, and that this alliance was most pernicious. What, then, is the defence? Even this, that he betrayed his master's

The dates of the two poems will, we served the reputation of infallible wisthink, explain this discrepancy. The dom and invariable success, he lived to third part of Hudibras appeared in see a mighty ruin wrought by his own 1678, when the character of Shaftes- ungovernable passions, to see the great bury had as yet but imperfectly deve-party which he had led vanquished, and loped itself. He had, indeed, been a scattered, and trampled down, to see traitor to every party in the State; but all his own devilish enginery of lying his treasons had hitherto prospered. witnesses, partial sheriffs, packed juries, Whether it were accident or sagacity, unjust judges, bloodthirsty mobs, ready he had timed his desertions in such a to be employed against himself and his manner that fortune seemed to go to most devoted followers, to fly from that and fro with him from side to side. proud city whose favour had almost The extent of his perfidy was known; raised him to be Mayor of the Palace, but it was not till the Popish Plot fur- to hide himself in squalid retreats, to nished him with a machinery which cover his grey head with ignominious seemed sufficiently powerful for all disguises; and he died in hopeless his purposes, that the audacity of his exile, sheltered by the generosity of a spirit, and the fierceness of his male- State which he had cruelly injured and volent passions, became fully manifest. insulted, from the vengeance of a masHis subsequent conduct showed un-ter whose favour he had purchased by doubtedly great ability, but not ability one series of crimes, and forfeited by of the sort for which he had formerly another. been so eminent. He was now head- Halifax had, in common with Shaftesstrong, sanguine, full of impetuous bury, and with almost all the politicians confidence in his own wisdom and his of that age, a very loose morality where own good luck. He, whose fame as a the public was concerned; but in Halipolitical tactician had hitherto rested fax the prevailing infection was modichiefly on his skilful retreats, now set fied by a very peculiar constitution himself to break down all the bridges both of heart and head, by a temper behind him. His plans were castles in singularly free from gall, and by a the air: his talk was rodomontade. refining and sceptical understanding. He took no thought for the morrow: He changed his course as often as he treated the Court as if the King Shaftesbury; but he did not change it were already a prisoner in his hands: to the same extent, or in the same he built on the favour of the multitude, direction. Shaftesbury was the very as if that favour were not proverbially reverse of a trimmer. His disposition inconstant. The signs of the coming led him generally to do his utmost reaction were discerned by men of far to exalt the side which was up, and less sagacity than his, and scared from to depress the side which was down. his side men more consistent than he His transitions were from extreme to had ever pretended to be. But on him extreme. While he stayed with a they were lost. The counsel of Ahitho- party he went all lengths for it: when phel, that counsel which was as if a he quitted it he went all lengths against man had inquired of the oracle of God, it. Halifax was emphatically a trimwas turned into foolishness. He who mer; a trimmer both by intellect and had become a by-word, for the cer- by constitution. The name was fixed tainty with which he foresaw and the on him by his contemporaries; and he suppleness with which he evaded dan- was so far from being ashamed of it ger, now, when beset on every side that he assumed it as a badge of with snares and death, seemed to be honour. He passed from faction to smitten with a blindness as strange as faction. But instead of adopting and his former clear-sightedness, and, turn-inflaming the passions of those whom ing neither to the right nor to the left, he joined, he tried to diffuse among strode straight on with desperate hardi- them something of the spirit of those hood to his doom. Therefore, after whom he had just left. While he having carly acquired and long pre- acted with the Opposition he was

suspected of being a spy of the Court; | Shaftesbury will bear a comparison and when he had joined the Court all with the political tracts of Halifax. the Tories were dismayed by his Republican doctrines.

Indeed, very little of the prose of that age is so well worth reading as the He wanted neither arguments nor Character of a Trimmer and the Anaeloquence to exhibit what was com- tomy of an Equivalent. What partimonly regarded as his wavering policy cularly strikes us in those works is the in the fairest light. He trimmed, he writer's passion for generalisation. He said, as the temperate zone trims be- was treating of the most exciting subtween intolerable heat and intolerable jects in the most agitated times: he cold, as a good government trims be- was himself placed in the very thick tween despotism and anarchy, as a of the civil conflict; yet there is no pure church trims between the errors acrimony, nothing inflammatory, noof the Papist and those of the Ana- thing personal. He preserves an air baptist. Nor was this defence by of cold superiority, a certain philosoany means without weight; for though phical serenity, which is perfectly marthere is abundant proof that his in- vellous. He treats every question as tegrity was not of strength to with- an abstract question, begins with the stand the temptations by which his widest propositions, argues those procupidity and vanity were sometimes positions on general grounds, and often, assailed, yet his dislike of extremes, when he has brought out his theorem, and a forgiving and compassionate leaves the reader to make the applicatemper which seems to have been tion, without adding an allusion to natural to him, preserved him from all participation in the worst crimes of his time. If both parties accused him of deserting them, both were compelled to admit that they had great obligations to his humanity, and that, though an uncertain friend, he was a placable enemy. He voted in favour of Lord Stafford, the victim of the Whigs; he did his utmost to save Lord Russell, the victim of the Tories; and, on the whole, we are inclined to think that his public life, though far indeed from faultless, has as few great stains as that of any politician who took an active part in affairs during the troubled and disastrous period of ten years which elapsed between the fall of Lord Danby and the Revolution.

His mind was much less turned to particular observations, and much more to general speculations, than that of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury knew the King, the Council, the Parliament, the city, better than Halifax; but Halifax would have written a far better treatise on political science than Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury shone more in consultation, and Halifax in controversy: Shaftesbury was more fertile in expedients, and Halifax in arguments. Nothing that remains from the pen of

particular men or to passing events. This speculative turn of mind rendered him a bad adviser in cases which required celerity. He brought forward, with wonderful readiness and copiousness, arguments, replies to those arguments, rejoinders to those replies, general maxims of policy, and analogous cases from history. But Shaftesbury was the man for a prompt decision. Of the parliamentary eloquence of these celebrated rivals, we can judge only by report; and, so judging, we should be inclined to think that, though Shaftesbury was a distinguished speaker, the superiority belonged to Halifax. Indeed the readiness of Halifax in debate, the extent of his knowledge, the ingenuity of his reasoning, the liveliness of his expression, and the silver clearness and sweetness of his voice, seem to have made the strongest impression on his contemporaries. By Dryden he is described as

"of piercing wit and pregnant thought, Endued by nature and by learning taught To move assemblies."

His oratory is utterly and irretrievably lost to us, like that of Somers, of Bolingbroke, of Charles Townshend, of many others who were accustomed to rise amidst the breathless expectation of senates, and to sit down amidst re

iterated bursts of applause. But old | least as formidable as that of Halifax ; men who lived to admire the eloquence and this was true; but Temple might of Pulteney in its meridian, and that have replied that by giving power to of Pitt in its splendid dawn, still mur- Halifax they gained a friend, and that mured that they had heard nothing by giving power to Shaftesbury, they like the great speeches of Lord Halifax only strengthened an enemy. It was on the Exclusion Bill. The power of vain to argue and protest. The King Shaftesbury over large masses was un- only laughed and jested at Temple's rivalled. Halifax was disqualified by anger; and Shaftesbury was not only his whole character, moral and intel- sworn of the Council, but appointed lectual, for the part of a demagogue. Lord President. It was in small circles, and above all, in the House of Lords, that his ascendency was felt.