TH SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE OCTOBER, 1838 NOTE ON THE ESSAY HIS is one of the most agreeable of Macaulay's Essays. The long and diversified career of Sir William Temple allowed the essayist to glide very easily from one attractive topic to another, from the love-letters of Dorothy Osborne to the diplomacy of John de Witt, and from a disquisition on the Privy Council to a notice of the academic controversy as to the respective merits of ancient and modern authors. Variety of subjects is proper to the essay and it was favourable to the full exercise of Macaulay's powers. Others might have entered more deeply into the politics of the Restoration or have given us more delicate observations upon literature, but no other writer of that generation could have managed so many subjects with so much ease or have displayed such a mixture of political and literary knowledge. So to display your knowledge as not to seem vainglorious or pedantic, and yet to give your readers the impression that they are learning much, is a sure means of giving pleasure and therefore of earning praise. Even in the essay on Temple it is true the severe historian will espy errors and misconceptions. Macaulay's ingenious criticism of Temple's scheme for reforming the Privy Council is too much pervaded by the notion that Cabinet Government was familiar to the minds of Temple and his contemporaries. Had this been the case Temple would doubtless have felt the force of Macaulay's observations upon the unwieldy character of his proposed Privy Council and the impossibility that it should ever agree well enough to govern the kingdom. But though the first rudiments of what we call Cabinet Government are visible soon after the Restoration their true import was not recognised by the subjects of Charles II. In those days men expected the King to govern in person with the help of his ministers in their respective provinces and with the advice of his Privy Council as to general policy. The Privy Councillors were not regarded as bound to each other by any tie of customary morals. They were not expected to agree or to profess that they agreed with one another. On the contrary the public would have thought them more likely to fulfil their function if they held different opinions. The multitude of councillors can avail little towards wisdom if they all say exactly the same thing. Those who govern indeed must VOL. II.-16 act as one man, but the Privy Councillors were not supposed to govern. Therefore the conditions laid down by Temple for his reformed Privy Council would have recommended themselves to intelligent Englishmen of that day. That the Privy Councillors should be numerous enough to save the monarch and the State from the eccentric or perverse advice of an individual, that the half of them should hold no office of State so as to have less inducement for concealing their thoughts in the hope of keeping their places, that they should all be rich so as to render them less accessible to corruption whether by the King or by ambitious men, all these attributes of the new council would be so many recommendations. That Temple's council failed is true, but it failed chiefly because political events were irresistibly bringing to birth a new governing agency which was not comprehended even by those who employed it until the nineteenth century. Again Macaulay's delineation of Shaftesbury must be confessed inaccurate in some of the gravest particulars. For once Macaulay overcharged the vices of a Whig statesman. He was misled partly by imperfect knowledge, partly by that passion for making out indictments which in later years led him to turn Sir Elijah Impey into a monster. We now know that Shaftesbury was not privy to the secret treaty at Dover, and that he did not advise the stop of the Exchequer. We may not be able to follow Mr. Christie in throwing out the whole indictment. We may think that his hero should not have taken part in the trial of the regicides. We may think that Shaftesbury could not have been the dupe of those fictions which inflamed the crowd to madness in the time of the Popish Plot. But we shall probably conclude that Shaftesbury was one of many unscrupulous public men in an immoral age rather than the pattern of absolute evil which he appears in the invective of Macaulay. SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE Memoirs of the Life, Works, and Correspondence of Sir William Temple. By the Right HON. THOmas Peregrine COURTENAY. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1836. MR. R. COURTENAY1 has long been well known to politicians as an industrious and useful official man, and as an up right and consistent member of Parliament. He has been one of the most moderate, and, at the same time, one of the least pliant members of the Conservative party. His conduct has, indeed, on some questions, been so Whiggish, that both those who applauded and those who condemned it have questioned his claim to be considered as a Tory. But his Toryism, such as it is, he has held fast through all changes of fortune and fashion; and he has at last retired from public life, leaving behind him, to the best of our belief, no personal enemy, and carrying with him the respect and good will of many who strongly dissent from his opinions. This book, the fruit of Mr. Courtenay's leisure, is introduced by a preface in which he informs us that the assistance furnished to him from various quarters "has taught him the superiority of literature to politics for developing the kindlier feelings, and conducing to an agreeable life." We are truly glad that Mr. Courtenay is so well satisfied with his new employment, and we heartily congratulate him on having been driven by events to make an exchange which, advantageous as it is, few people make while they can avoid it. He has little reason, in our opinion, to envy any of those who are still engaged in a pursuit from which, at most, they can only expect that, by relinquishing liberal studies and social pleasures, by passing nights without sleep and summers without one glimpse of the beauty of nature, they may attain that laborious, that invidious, that closely watched slavery which is mocked with the name of power. 'Thomas Peregrine Courtenay, 1782-1841, first entered Parliament in 1810. From 1812 to 1828 he was Secretary to the Board of Control. He next became Vice-President of the Board of Trade, but retired in 1830. He was the author of several works besides the Memoirs here reviewed. The volumes before us are fairly entitled to the praise of diligence, care, good sense, and impartiality; and these qualities are sufficient to make a book valuable, but not quite sufficient to make it readable. Mr. Courtenay has not sufficiently studied the arts of selection and compression. The information with which he furnishes us, must still, we apprehend, be considered as so much raw material. To manufacturers it will be highly useful; but it is not yet in such a form that it can be enjoyed by the idle consumer. To drop metaphor, we are afraid that this work will be less acceptable to those who read for the sake of reading, than to those who read in order to write. We cannot help adding, though we are extremely unwilling to quarrel with Mr. Courtenay about politics, that the book would not be at all the worse if it contained fewer snarls against the Whigs of the present day. Not only are these passages out of place in a historical work, but some of them are intrinsically such that they would become the editor of a third-rate party newspaper better than a gentleman of Mr. Courtenay's talents and knowledge. For example, we are told that, "it is a remarkable circumstance, familiar to those who are acquainted with history, but suppressed by the new Whigs, that the liberal politicians of the seventeenth century and the greater part of the eighteenth, never extended their liberality to the native Irish, or the professors of the ancient religion." What schoolboy of fourteen is ignorant of this remarkable circumstance? What Whig, new or old, was ever such an idiot as to think that it could be suppressed? Really we might as well say that it is a remarkable circumstance, familiar to people well read in history, but carefully suppressed by the Clergy of the Established Church, that in the fifteenth century England was in communion with Rome. We are tempted to make some remarks on another passage, which seems to be the peroration of a speech intended to have been spoken against the Reform Bill: but we forbear.1 We doubt whether it will be found that the memory of Sir William Temple owes much to Mr. Courtenay's researches. Temple is one of those men whom the world has agreed to praise highly without knowing much about them, and who are therefore more likely to lose than to gain by a close examination. Yet he is not without fair pretensions to the most honourable place among the statesmen of his time. A few of them equalled or surpassed him in talents; but they were men of no good repute for honesty. A 1 Courtenay, vol. ii., pp. 124-128. |