knew not the Stuarts. The Dissenters were tolerated; the Catholics not cruelly persecuted. The Church was drowsy and indulgent. The great civil and religious conflict which began at the Reformation seemed to have terminated in universal repose. Whigs and Tories, Churchmen and Puritans, spoke with equal reverence of the constitution, and with equal enthusiasm of the talents, virtues, and services of the Minister. A few years sufficed to change the whole aspect of affairs. A nation convulsed by faction, a throne assailed by the fiercest invective, a House of Commons hated and despised by the nation, England set against Scotland, Britain set against America, a rival legislature sitting beyond the Atlantic, English blood shed by English bayonets, our armies capitulating, our conquests wrested from us, our enemies hastening to take vengeance for past humiliation, our flag scarcely able to maintain itself in our own seas, such was the spectacle which Pitt lived to see. But the history of this great revolution requires far more space than we can at present bestow. We leave the Great Commoner in the zenith of his glory. It is not impossible that we may take some other opportunity of tracing his life to its melancholy, yet not inglorious close.

SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH

JULY, 1835

NOTE ON THE ESSAY

AMES MACKINTOSH was born on the 24th of October, 1765, at the village of Aldourie, a few miles from Inverness. His youthful ambition was turned to the law, but circumstances compelled him to study medicine which he practised for some years. He came to London in 1788, and contributed to a journal known as the Oracle. In 1791 his reply to Burke's Thoughts on the French Revolution made him suddenly famous and gained him an introduction to Fox and Sheridan. Some time afterwards he was called to the English bar, but, though he had a modest practice, he remained at heart a man of letters and a politician. He had become the intimate friend of Burke whose influence may have assisted the enormities of the Jacobins in bringing Mackintosh to disavow, somewhat more passionately than Macaulay would have us believe, all sympathy with the Revolution. In 1799 and 1800 Mackintosh delivered to large audiences in the hall of Lincoln's Inn a series of lectures on the Law of Nature and of Nations which he afterwards published. In 1803 he distinguished himself by his brilliant but not strictly professional defence of Peltier, a French exile, who was accused of having incited to the murder of the First Consul. Mackintosh now unwisely accepted the recordership of Bombay, which involved an exile of nine years from the friends and the pursuits in which he most delighted. On his return to England he gained a seat in the House of Commons, where, as Macaulay hints, he did not meet with the success which his ability and accomplishments seemed to warrant, but where he gained lasting honour by his labours for the reform of the criminal law. During some years he was Professor of Law and General Politics at the Haileybury College for Indian civil servants. At this period he wrote a Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, a History of England for the Cabinet Cyclopædia and a Life of Sir Thomas More. He was a frequent guest at Holland House. In 1827 he was made a Privy Councillor, and when the Whigs returned to power he was VOL. II.-4

appointed a Commissioner of the Board of Control. On the 30th of May, 1832, he died. As a public man he was unfortunate in the want of fortune, in the weakness of the party to which he belonged, and in a certain professorial style which always excites prejudice against a speaker in the House of Commons. As a man of letters he lacked depth, intensity and that iron love of labour without which the highest excellence cannot be achieved. In private life as a husband, father and friend he was amiable and happy.

The essay upon Mackintosh has made little impression upon readers. There are very few passages in it which a well-informed person could on hearing them read refer to their context. For this neglect there are several reasons. The essay has no hero, no familiar and impressive theme. Mackintosh himself is almost forgotten. His unfinished History of the English Revolution was long ago superseded by Macaulay's, and the orthodox Whig theory of the Revolution which both had adopted has undergone revision by writers like Ranke more independent of party considerations. Macaulay's justification of Mackintosh's changes of opinion is marked by his usual common sense, but also by his usual commonplace. Macaulay never reaches very far beyond a particular phase of English thought, and when he becomes speculative he propounds truisms with vexatious gravity. The onslaught upon Charles II. and the politics of the Restoration is vigorous, but less effective than similar outbreaks in the essay on Hallam and the essay on Temple. The best part of the essay is the clear and forcible statement of the benefits secured by the English Revolution, benefits often decried in the nineteenth century because that Revolution brought forth neither heroic virtue nor enormous villany. As a whole the essay interests chiefly by its anticipations of the History of England. In both Macaulay's conception of the period of the Revolution is substantially the same, although in the History it is expressed with more force as well as with more moderation.

SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH

History of the Revolution in England, in 1688. Comprising a View of the Reign of James the Second, from his Accession to the Enterprise of the Prince of Orange, by the late Right Honourable Sir JAMES MACKINTOSH; and completed to the Settlement of the Crown, by the Editor. To which is prefixed a Notice of the Life, Writings, and Speeches of Sir James Mackintosh. 4to. London: 1834.2

IT

T is with unfeigned diffidence that we venture to give our opinion of the last work of Sir James Mackintosh. We

have in vain tried to perform what ought to be to a critic an easy and habitual act. We have in vain tried to separate the book from the writer, and to judge of it as if it bore some unknown name. But it is to no purpose. All the lines of that venerable countenance are before us. All the little peculiar cadences of that voice from which scholars and statesmen loved to receive the lessons of a serene and benevolent wisdom are in our ears. We will attempt to preserve strict impartiality. But we are not ashamed to own that we approach this relic of a virtuous and most accomplished man with feelings of respect and gratitude which may possibly pervert our judgment.

1 The editor was a Mr. Wallace. See Trevelyan, Life and Letters, ch. vii.

2 AUTHOR'S FOOTNOTE.-In this review, as it originally stood, the editor of the History of the Revolution was attacked with an asperity which neither literary defects nor speculative differences can justify, and which ought to be reserved for offences against the laws of morality and honour. The reviewer was not actuated by any feeling of personal malevolence: for when he wrote this paper in a distant country, he did not know, or even guess, whom he was assailing. His only motive was regard for the memory of an eminent man whom he loved and honoured, and who appeared to him to have been unworthily treated.

The editor is now dead; and, while living, declared that he had been misunderstood, and that he had written in no spirit of enmity to Sir James Mackintosh, for whom he professed the highest respect.

Many passages have therefore been softened, and some wholly omitted. The severe censure passed on the literary execution of the Memoir and Continuation could not be retracted without a violation of truth. But whatever could be construed into an imputation on the moral character of the editor has been carefully expunged.

It is hardly possible to avoid instituting a comparison between this work and another celebrated Fragment. Our readers will easily guess that we allude to Mr. Fox's History of James the Second.1 The two books relate to the same subject. Both were posthumously published. Neither had received the last corrections. The authors belonged to the same political party, and held the same opinions concerning the merits and defects of the English constitution, and concerning most of the prominent characters and events in English history. Both had thought much on the principles of government; yet they were not mere speculators. Both had ransacked the archives of rival kingdoms, and pored on folios which had mouldered for ages in deserted libraries; yet they were not mere antiquaries. They had one eminent qualification for writing history: they had spoken history, acted history, lived history. The turns of political fortune, the ebb and flow of popular feeling, the hidden mechanism by which parties are moved, all these things were the subjects of their constant thought and of their most familiar conversation. Gibbon has remarked that he owed part of his success as a historian to the observations which he had made as an officer in the militia and as a member of the House of Commons.2 The remark is most just. We have not the smallest doubt that his campaign, though he never saw an enemy, and his parliamentary attendance, though he never made a speech, were of far more use to him than years of retirement and study would have been. If the time that he spent on parade and at mess in Hampshire, or on the Treasury bench and at Brookes's during the storms which overthrew Lord North and Lord Shelburne, had been passed in the Bodleian Library, he might have avoided some inaccuracies;

1 A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second with an Introductory Chapter. Fox began this work at the time when fortune was most adverse to him in politics. He meant to bring it down to the Revolution of 1688, but did not get farther than the execution of Monmouth. The "Fragment" was first published by Lord Holland in 1808. In the present state of historical knowledge it is of no great value. Macaulay's criticism on the style contrasts curiously with the epithets of "cold" and " uninteresting used by Mr. Hunt in the Dictionary of National Biography. Those who read the argument on the condemnation of Sidney will hardly find the intensity on which Macaulay dwells.

As a captain in the Hampshire Militia at the period of the Seven Years' War Gibbon was condemned during two years and a half (10th May, 1760, to 23rd December, 1762) to a wandering life of military servitude." But he adds: "The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion; and the captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire." Gibbon was member for Liskeard from 1775 to 1783 (see Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writings)