by submission to purchase the forbearance of their new master; and their partisans, if partisans they had, reserved themselves in silence for a day of retribution, which came not before Cromwell slept in his grave. The royalists congratulated each other on an event which they deemed a preparatory step to the restoration of the king; the army and navy, in numerous addresses, declared that they would live and die, stand and fall, with the lordgeneral; and in every part of the country the congregations of the saints magnified the arm of the Lord, which had broken the mighty, that in lieu of the sway of mortal men, the fifth monarchy, the reign of Christ might be established on earth.

It would, however, be unjust to the memory of those 11 who exercised the supreme power after the death of the king, not to acknowledge that there existed among them men capable of wielding with energy the destinies of a great empire. They governed only four years; yet, under their auspices, the conquests of Ireland and Scotland were achieved, and a navy was created, the rival of that of Holland and the terror of the rest of Europe. But there existed an essential error in their form of government. Deliberative assemblies are always slow in their proceedings; yet the pleasure of parliament, as the supreme power, was to be taken on every subject connected with the foreign relations or the internal administration of the country; and hence it happened that, among the immense variety of questions which came before it, those commanded immediate attention which were deemed of immediate necessity; while the others, though often of the highest importance to the national welfare, were first postponed, then neglected, and ultimately forgotten. To this habit of procrastination was perhaps owing the extinction of its authority. It disappointed

the hopes of the country, and supplied Cromwell with the most plausible arguments in defense of his conduct.

1

(See note on the same subject, extract from Macaulay.)

It is not speaking with exaggeration, but with strict measured sobriety, to say that this book of Boswell's will give us more real insight into the history of England during those days than twenty other books, falsely entitled "Histories," which take to themselves that special aim. What good is it to me though innumerable Smolletts and Belshams keep dinning in my ears that a man named George III was born and bred up, and a man named George II died; that Walpole, and the Pelhams, and Chatham, and Rockingham, and Shelburne, and Worth, with their Coalition or their Separation Ministries, all ousted one another; and vehemently scrambled for "the thing they called the rudder of government, but which was in reality the spigot of taxation"? That debates were held, and infinite jarring and jargoning took place; and road-bills, and inclosure-bills, and game-bills, and India-bills, and laws which no man can number, which happily few men needed to trouble their heads with beyond the passing moment, were enacted, and printed by the king's stationer? That he who sat in Chancery, and rayed-out speculation from the Woolsack, was now a man that squinted, now a man that did not 2 squint? To the hungry and thirsty mind all this avas next to nothing. These men and these things, we indeed

know, did swim, by strength or by specific levity, as apples on the top of the current; but is it by painfully noting the courses, eddyings, and bobbings hither and thither of such drift-articles that you will unfold to me the nature of the current itself; of that mighty-rolling, loud-roaring life-current, bottomless as the foundations of the universe, mysterious as its Author? The thing I want to see is not Redbook Lists, and Court Calendars, and Parliamentary Registers, but the LIFE OF MAN in England; what men did, thought, suffered, enjoyed; the form, especially the spirit, of their terrestrial existence, its outward environment, its inward principle; how and what it was; whence it proceeded, whither it was tending.

Mournful, in truth, is it to behold what the business 3 called "History," in these so enlightened and illuminated times, still continues to be. Can you gather from it, read till your eyes go out, any dimmest shadow of an answer to that great question: How men lived and had their being; were it but economically, as, what wages they got, and what they bought with these? Unhappily you can not. History will throw no light on any such matter. At the point where living memory fails, it is all darkness; Mr. Senior and Mr. Sadler must still debate this simplest of all elements in the condition of the past. Whether men were better off in their mere larders and pantries, or were worse off than now! History, as it stands all bound up in gilt volumes, is but a shade more instructive than the wooden volumes of a backgammon board. How my prime minister was appointed is of less moment to me than how my house-servant was hired. In these days, ten ordinary histories of kings and courtiers were well exchanged against the tenth part of one good history of booksellers.

For example, I would fain know the history of Scot-4

land; who can tell it me? "Robertson," say innumerable voices; "Robertson against the world." I open Robertson; and find there, through long ages too confused for narrative, and fit only to be presented in the way of epitome and distilled essence, a cunning answer and hypothesis, not to this question. By whom, and by what means, when and how, was this fair, broad Scotland, with its arts and manufactures, temples, schools, institutions, poetry, spirit, national character, created and made arable, verdant, peculiar, great, here as I can see some fair section of it lying, kind and strong (like some Bacchustamed lion), from the Castle-hill of Edinburgh!—but to this other question: How did the King keep himself alive in those old days; and restrain so many butcherbarons and ravenous henchmen from utterly extirpating one another, so that killing went on in some sort of moderation? In the one little letter of Eneas Sylvius, from old Scotland, there is more of history than in all 5 this. At length, however, we come to a luminous age, interesting enough: to the age of the Reformation. All Scotland is awakened, Scotland is convulsed, fermenting, struggling to body itself forth anew. To the herdsman, among his cattle in remote woods; to the craftsman, in his rude, heath-thatched workshop, among his rude guildbrethren; to the great and to the little, a new light has arisen: in town and hamlet groups are gathered, with eloquent looks, and governed or ungovernable tongues. We ask, with breathless eagerness: How was it; how went it on? Let us understand it, let us see it, and know 6 it! In reply, is handed us a really graceful and most dainty little Scandalous Chronicle (as for some Journal of Fashion) of two persons: Mary Stuart, a beauty, but over light-headed; and Henry Darnley, a booby who had fine legs. How these first courted, billed, and cooed, ac

cording to nature; then pouted, fretted, grew utterly enraged, and blew one another up with gunpowder: this, and not the history of Scotland, is what we good-naturedly read. Nay, by other hands, something like a horseload of other books has been written to prove that it was the beauty who blew up the booby, and that it was not she. Who or what it was, the thing once for all being so effectually done, concerns us little. To know Scotland at that great epoch, were a valuable increase of knowledge to know poor Darnley, and see him with burning candle, from center to skin, were no increase of knowledge at all. Thus is history written.

Hence, indeed, comes it that history, which should be "the essence of innumerable biographies," will tell us, 7 question it as we like, less than one genuine biography may do, pleasantly and of its own accord! The time is approaching when history will be attempted on quite other principles; when the court, the senate, and the battle-field, receding more and more into the background, the temple, the workshop, and social hearth will advance more and more into the foreground; and history will not content itself with shaping some answer to that question: How were men taxed and kept quiet then? but will seek to answer this other infinitely wider and higher question: How and what were men then? Not our Government only, or the "house wherein our life was led," but the life itself we led there, will be inquired into. Of which latter it may be found that government, in any modern sense of the word, is, after all, but a secondary condition: in the mere sense of taxation and keeping quiet, a small, almost a pitiful one. Meanwhile let us welcome such Boswells, each in his degree, as bring us any genuine contribution, were it never so inadequate, so inconsiderable.