Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes Part 13

ON MACAULAY

[From _The Quarterly Review_, March, 1849]

_The History of England from the Accession of James II_.

By THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. 2 vols. 8vo. 1849.

The reading world will not need our testimony, though we willingly give it, that Mr. Macaulay possesses great talents and extraordinary acquirements. He unites powers and has achieved successes, not only various, but different in their character, and seldom indeed conjoined in one individual. He was while in Parliament, though not quite an orator, and still less a debater, the most brilliant rhetorician of the House. His Roman ballads (as we said in an article on their first appearance) exhibit a novel idea worked out with a rare felicity, so as to combine the spirit of the ancient minstrels with the regularity of construction and sweetness of versification which modern taste requires; and his critical Essays exhibit a wide variety of knowledge with a great fertility of ill.u.s.tration, and enough of the salt of pleasantry and sarcasm to flavour and in some degree disguise a somewhat declamatory and pretentious dogmatism. It may seem too epigrammatic, but it is, in our serious judgment, strictly true, to say that his History seems to be a kind of combination and exaggeration of the peculiarities of all his former efforts. It is as full of political prejudice and partisan advocacy as any of his parliamentary speeches. It makes the facts of English History as fabulous as his Lays do those of Roman tradition; and it is written with as captious, as dogmatical, and as cynical a spirit as the bitterest of his Reviews. That upon so serious an undertaking he has lavished uncommon exertion, is not to be doubted; nor can any one during the first reading escape the _entrainement_ of his picturesque, vivid, and pregnant execution: but we have fairly stated the impression left on ourselves by a more calm and leisurely perusal. We have been so long the opponents of the political party to which Mr. Macaulay belongs that we welcomed the prospect of again meeting him on the neutral ground of literature. We are of that cla.s.s of Tories--Protestant Tories, as they were called--that have no sympathy with the Jacobites. We are as strongly convinced as Mr. Macaulay can be of the necessity of the Revolution of 1688--of the general prudence and expediency of the steps taken by our Whig and Tory ancestors of the Convention Parliament, and of the happiness, for a century and a half, of the const.i.tutional results. We were, therefore, not without hope that at least in these two volumes, almost entirely occupied with the progress and accomplishment of that Revolution, we might without any sacrifice of our political feelings enjoy unalloyed the pleasures reasonably to be expected from Mr. Macaulay's high powers both of research and ill.u.s.tration. That hope has been deceived: Mr. Macaulay's historical narrative is poisoned with a rancour more violent than even the pa.s.sions of the time; and the literary qualities of the work, though in some respects very remarkable, are far from redeeming its substantial defects. There is hardly a page-- we speak literally, hardly a page--that does not contain something objectionable either in substance or in colour: and the whole of the brilliant and at first captivating narrative is perceived on examination to be impregnated to a really marvellous degree with bad taste, bad feeling, and, we are under the painful necessity of adding--bad faith.

These are grave charges: but we make them in sincerity, and we think that we shall be able to prove them; and if, here or hereafter, we should seem to our readers to use harsher terms than good taste might approve, we beg in excuse to plead that it is impossible to fix one's attention on, and to transcribe large portions of a work, without being in some degree infected with its spirit; and Mr. Macaulay's pages, whatever may be their other characteristics, are as copious a repertorium of vituperative eloquence as, we believe, our language can produce, and especially against everything in which he chooses (whether right or wrong) to recognise the shibboleth of Toryism. We shall endeavour, however, in the expression of our opinions, to remember the respect we owe to our readers and to Mr. Macaulay's general character and standing in the world of letters, rather than the provocations and examples of the volumes immediately before us.

Mr. Macaulay announces his intention of bringing down the history of England almost to our own times; but these two volumes are complete in themselves, and we may fairly consider them as a history of the Revolution; and in that light the first question that presents itself to us is why Mr. Macaulay has been induced to re-write what had already been so often and even so recently written--among others, by Dalrymple, a strenuous but honest Whig, and by Mr. Macaulay's own oracles, Fox and Mackintosh? It may be answered that both Fox and Mackintosh left their works imperfect. Fox got no farther than Monmouth's death; but Mackintosh came down to the Orange invasion, and covered full nine-tenths of the period as yet occupied by Mr. Macaulay. Why then did Mr.

Macaulay not content himself with beginning where Mackintosh left off-- that is, with the Revolution? and it would have been the more natural, because, as our readers know, it is there that Hume's history terminates.

What reason does he give for this work of supererogation? None. He does not (as we shall see more fully by and by) take the slightest notice of Mackintosh's history, no more than if it had never existed. Has he produced a new fact? Not one. Has he discovered any new materials? None, as far as we can judge, but the collections of Fox and Mackintosh, confided to him by their families.[1] It seems to us a novelty in literary practice that a writer raised far by fame and fortune above the vulgar temptations of the craft should undertake to tell a story already frequently and recently told by masters of the highest authority and most extensive information, without having, or even professing to have, any additional means or special motive to account for the attempt.

[1] It appears from two notes of acknowledgments to M. Guizot and the keepers of the archives at The Hague, that Mr. Macaulay obtained some additions to the copies which Mackintosh already had of the letters of Ronquillo the Spanish and Citters the Dutch minister at the court of James. We may conjecture that these additions were insignificant, since Mr. Macaulay has nowhere, that we have observed, specially noticed them; but except these, whatever they may be, we find no trace of anything that Fox and Mackintosh had not already examined and cla.s.sed.

We suspect, however, that we can trace Mr. Macaulay's design to its true source--the example and success of the author of Waverley. The historical novel, if not invented, at least first developed and ill.u.s.trated by the happy genius of Scott, took a sudden and extensive hold of the public taste; he himself, in most of his subsequent novels, availed himself largely of the historical element which had contributed so much to the popularity of Waverley. The press has since that time groaned with his imitators. We have had historical novels of all cla.s.ses and grades. We have had served up in this form the Norman Conquest and the Wars of the Roses, the Gunpowder Plot and the Fire of London, Darnley and Richelieu--and almost at the same moment with Mr. Macaulay's appeared a professed romance of Mr. Ainsworth's on the same subject-- James II. Nay, on a novelist of this popular order has been conferred the office of _Historiographer_ to the Queen.

Mr. Macaulay, too mature not to have well measured his own peculiar capacities, not rich in invention but ingenious in application, saw the use that might be made of this principle, and that history itself would be much more popular with a large embroidery of personal, social, and even topographical anecdote and ill.u.s.tration, instead of the sober garb in which we had been in the habit of seeing it. Few histories indeed ever were or could be written without some admixture of this sort. The father of the art himself, old Herodotus, vivified his text with a greater share of what we may call personal anecdote than any of his cla.s.sical followers. Modern historians, as they happened to have more or less of what we may call _artistic_ feeling, admitted more or less of this decoration into their text, but always with an eye (which Mr.

Macaulay never exercises) to the appropriateness and value of the ill.u.s.tration. Generally, however, such matters have been thrown into notes, or, in a few instances--as by Dr. Henry and in Mr. Knight's interesting and instructive "Pictorial History"--into separate chapters.

The large cla.s.s of memoir-writers may also be fairly considered as anecdotical historians--and they are in fact the sources from which the novelists of the new school extract their princ.i.p.al characters and main incidents.

Mr. Macaulay deals with history, evidently, as we think, in imitation of the novelists--his first object being always picturesque effect--his constant endeavour to give from all the repositories of gossip that have reached us a kind of circ.u.mstantial reality to his incidents, and a sort of dramatic life to his personages. For this purpose he would not be very solicitous about contributing any substantial addition to history, strictly so called; on the contrary, indeed, he seems to have willingly taken it as he found it, adding to it such lace and tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs as he could collect from the Monmouth-street of literature, seldom it may be safely presumed of very delicate quality. It is, as Johnson drolly said, "an old coat with a new facing--the old dog in a new doublet." The conception was bold, and--so far as availing himself, like other novelists, of the fashion of the day to produce a popular and profitable effect--the experiment has been eminently successful.

But besides the obvious incentives just noticed, Mr. Macaulay had also the stimulus of what we may compendiously call a strong party spirit.

One would have thought that the Whigs might have been satisfied with their share in the historical library of the Revolution:--besides Rapin, Echard, and Jones, who, though of moderate politics in general, were stout friends to the Revolution, they have had of professed and zealous Whigs, Burnet, the foundation of all, Kennett, Oldmixon, Dalrymple, Laing, Brodie, Fox, and finally Mackintosh and his continuator, besides innumerable writers of less note, who naturally adopted the successful side; and we should not have supposed that the reader of any of those historians, and particularly the later ones, could complain that they had been too sparing of imputation, or even vituperation, to the opposite party. But not so Mr. Macaulay. The most distinctive feature on the face of his pages is personal virulence--if he has at all succeeded in throwing an air of fresh life into his characters, it is mainly due, as any impartial and collected reader will soon discover, to the simple circ.u.mstance of his hating the individuals of the opposite party as bitterly, as pa.s.sionately, as if they were his own personal enemies-- more so, indeed, we hope than he would a mere political antagonist of his own day. When some one suggested to the angry O'Neil that one of the Anglo-Irish families whom he was reviling as strangers had been four hundred years settled in Ireland, the Milesian replied, "_I hate the churls as if they had come but yesterday_." Mr. Macaulay seems largely endowed with this (as with a more enviable) species of memory, and he hates, for example, King Charles I as if he had been murdered only yesterday. Let us not be understood as wishing to abridge an historian's full liberty of censure--but he should not be a satirist, still less a libeller. We do not say nor think that Mr. Macaulay's censures were always unmerited--far from it--but they are always, we think without exception, immoderate. Nay, it would scarcely be too much to say that this ma.s.sacre of character is the point on which Mr. Macaulay must chiefly rest any claims he can advance to the praise of impartiality, for while he paints everything that looks like a Tory in the blackest colours, he does not altogether spare any of the Whigs against whom he takes a spite, though he always visits them with a gentler correction.

In fact, except Oliver Cromwell, King William, a few gentlemen who had the misfortune to be executed or exiled for high treason, and every dissenting minister that he has or can find occasion to notice, there are hardly any persons mentioned who are not stigmatized as knaves or fools, differing only in degrees of "turpitude" and "imbecility". Mr.

Macaulay has almost realized the work that Alexander Chalmers's playful imagination had fancied, a _Biographia Flagitiosa_, or _The Lives of Eminent Scoundrels_. This is also an imitation of the Historical Novel, though rather in the track of Eugene Aram and Jack Sheppard than of Waverley or Woodstock; but what would you have? To attain the picturesque--the chief object of our artist--he adopts the ready process of dark colours and a rough brush. Nature, even at the worst, is never gloomy enough for a Spagnoletto, and Judge Jeffries himself, for the first time, excites a kind of pity when we find him (like one to whom he was nearly akin) not so black as he is painted.

From this first general view of Mr. Macaulay's Historical Novel, we now proceed to exhibit in detail some grounds for the opinion which we have ventured to express.

We premise that we are about to enter into details, because there is in fact little to question or debate about but details. We have already hinted that there is absolutely no new fact of any consequence, and, we think we can safely add, hardly a new view of any historical fact, in the whole book. Whatever there may remain questionable or debatable in the history of the period, we should have to argue with Burnet, Dalrymple, or Mackintosh, and not with Mr. Macaulay. It would, we know, have a grander air if we were to make his book the occasion of disquisitions on the rise and progress of the const.i.tution--on the causes by which the monarchy of the Tudors pa.s.sed, through the murder of Charles, to the despotism of Cromwell--how again that produced a restoration which settled none of the great moral or political questions which had generated all those agitations, and which, in return, those agitations had complicated and inflamed--and how, at last, the undefined, discordant, and antagonistic pretensions of the royal and democratical elements were reconciled by the Revolution and the Bill of Rights--and finally, whether with too much or too little violence to the principles of the ancient const.i.tution--all these topics, we say, would, if we were so inclined, supply us, as they have supplied Mr. Macaulay, with abundant opportunities of grave tautology and commonplace; but we decline to raise sham debates on points where there is no contest. We can have little historic difference, properly so called, with one who has no historical difference on the main facts with anybody else: instead, then, of pretending to treat any great questions, either of const.i.tutional learning or political philosophy, we shall confine ourselves to the humbler but more practical and more useful task above stated.

Our first complaint is of a comparatively small and almost mechanical, and yet very real, defect--the paucity and irregularity of his dates, and the mode in which the few that he does give are overlaid, as it were, by the text. This, though it may be very convenient to the writer, and quite indifferent to the reader, of an historical romance, is perplexing to any one who might wish to read and weigh the book as a serious history, of which dates are the guides and landmarks; and when they are visibly neglected we cannot but suspect that the historian will be found not very solicitous about strict accuracy. This negligence is carried to such an extent that, in what looks like a very copious table of contents, one of the most important events of the whole history-- that, indeed, on which the Revolution finally turned--the marriage of Princess Mary to the Prince of Orange, is not noticed; nor is any date affixed to the very cursory mention of it in the text. It is rather hard to force the reader who buys this last new model history, in general so profuse of details, to recur to one of the old-fashioned ones to discover that this important event happened in the year 1675, and on the 4th of November--a day thrice over remarkable in William's history--for his birth, his marriage, and his arrival with his invading army on the coast of Devon.

Our second complaint is of one of the least important, perhaps, but most prominent defects of Mr. Macaulay's book--his Style--not merely the choice and order of words, commonly called style, but the turn of mind which prompts the choice of expressions as well as of topics. We need not repeat that Mr. Macaulay has a great facility of language, a prodigal _copia verborum_--that he narrates rapidly and clearly--that he paints very forcibly,--and that his readers throughout the tale are carried on, or away, by something of the sorcery which a brilliant orator exercises over his auditory. But he has also in a great degree the faults of the oratorical style. He deals much too largely in epithets--a habit exceedingly dangerous to historical truth. He habitually constructs a piece of what should be calm, dispa.s.sionate narrative, upon the model of the most pa.s.sionate peroration--adhering in numberless instances to precisely the same specific formula of artifice.

His diction is often inflated into fustian, and he indulges in exaggeration till it sometimes, unconsciously no doubt, amounts to falsehood. It is a common fault of those who strive at producing oratorical effects, to oscillate between commonplace and extravagance; and while studying Mr. Macaulay, one feels as if vibrating between facts that every one knows and consequences which n.o.body can believe. We are satisfied that whoever will take, as we have been obliged to do, the pains of sifting what Mr. Macaulay has produced from his own mind with what he has borrowed from others, will be entirely of our opinion. In truth, when, after reading a page or two of this book, we have occasion to turn to the same transaction in Burnet, Dalrymple, or Hume, we feel as if we were exchanging the glittering agility of a rope-dancer for gentlemen in the attire and att.i.tude of society. And we must say that there is not one of those writers that does not give a clearer and more trustworthy account of all that is really historical in the period than can be collected from Mr. Macaulay's more decorated pages. We invite our readers to try Mr. Macaulay's merits as an historian by the test of comparison with his predecessors.

Every great painter is supposed to make a larger use of one particular colour. What a monstrous bladderful of _infamy_ Mr. Macaulay must have squeezed on his palette when he took to portrait-painting! We have no concern, except as friends to historical justice, for the characters of any of the parties thus stigmatized, nor have we room or time to discuss these, or the hundred other somewhat similar cases which the volumes present; but we have looked at the authorities cited by Mr. Macaulay, and we do not hesitate to say that, "as is his wont," he has, with the exception of Jeffries, outrageously exaggerated them.

We must next notice the way in which Mr. Macaulay refers to and uses his authorities--no trivial points in the execution of a historical work-- though we shall begin with comparatively small matters. In his chapter on manners, which we may call the most remarkable in his book, one of his most frequent references is to "Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684." It is referred to at least a dozen or fourteen times in that chapter alone; but we really have some doubt whether Mr. Macaulay knew the nature of the book he so frequently quoted. Chamberlayne's work, of which the real t.i.tle is "_Angliae_ [or, after the Scotch Union, _Magnae Britanniae_] _Not.i.tia, or the Present State of England_" [or _Great Britain_], was a kind of periodical publication, half history and half court-calendar. It was first published in 1669, and new editions or reprints, with new dates, were issued, not annually, we believe, but so frequently that there are between thirty and forty of them in the Museum, ending with 1755. From the way and for the purposes for which Mr. Macaulay quotes Chamberlayne, we should almost suspect that he had lighted on the volume for 1684, and, knowing of no other, considered it as a substantive work published in that year. _Once_ indeed he cites the date of 1686, but there was, it seems, no edition of that year, and this may be an accidental error; but however that may be, our readers will smile when they hear that the two first and several following pa.s.sages which Mr. Macaulay cites from Chamberlayne (i. 290 and 291), as _characteristic_ of the _days of Charles II_, distinctively from more modern times, are to be found _literatim_ in every succeeding "Chamberlayne" down to 1755--the last we have seen--were thus continually reproduced because the proprietors and editors of the table book knew they were _not_ particularly characteristical of one year or reign more than another--and now, in 1849, might be as well quoted as characteristics of the reign of George II as of Charles II. We must add that there are references to Chamberlayne and to several weightier books (some of which we shall notice more particularly hereafter), as justifying a.s.sertions for which, on examining the said books with our best diligence, we have not been able to find a shadow of authority.

Our readers know that there was a Dr. John Eachard who wrote a celebrated work on the "Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy." They also know that there was a Dr. Lawrence Echard who wrote both a History of England, and a History of the Revolution. Both of these were remarkable men; but we almost doubt whether Mr. Macaulay, who quotes the works of each, does not confound their persons, for he refers to them both by the common (as it may once have been) name of _Each_ard, and at least twenty times by the wrong name. This, we admit, is a small matter; but what will some Edinburgh Reviewer (_temp_. Albert V) say if he finds a writer confounding _Catherine_ and _Thomas_ Macaulay as "the celebrated author of the great Whig History of England"--a confusion hardly worse than that of the two Eachards--for Catherine, though now forgotten by an ungrateful public, made quite as much noise in her day as Thomas does in ours.

But we are sorry to say we have a heavier complaint against Mr.

Macaulay. We accuse him of a habitual and really injurious perversion of his authorities. This unfortunate indulgence, in whatever juvenile levity it may have originated, and through whatever steps it may have grown into an unconscious habit, seems to us to pervade the whole work-- from Alpha to Omega--from Procopius to Mackintosh--and it is on that very account the more difficult to bring to the distinct conception of our readers. Individual instances can be, and shall be, produced; but how can we extract and exhibit the minute particles that colour every thread of the texture?--how extract the impalpable atoms that have fermented the whole brewing? We must do as Dr. Faraday does at the Inst.i.tution when he exhibits in miniature the larger processes of Nature. We will suppose, then--taking a simple phrase as the fairest for the experiment--that Mr. Macaulay found Barillon saying in French, "_le drole m'a fait peur_," or Burnet saying in English, "_the fellow frightened me_." We should be pretty sure not to find the same words in Mr. Macaulay. He would pause--he would first consider whether "the fellow" spoken of was a _Whig_ or a _Tory_. If a Whig, the thing would be treated as a joke, and Mr. Macaulay would trans.m.u.te it playfully into "_the rogue startled me_"; but if a _Tory_, it would take a deeper dye, and we should find "_the villain a.s.saulted me_"; and in either case we should have a grave reference to

Jan. 31, "Barillon,-------- 1686"; or, "Burnet, i. 907."

Feb. 1,

If our reader will keep this formula in his mind, he will find it a fair exponent of Mr. Macaulay's _modus operandi_....

We shall now proceed to more general topics. We decline, as we set out by saying, to treat this "New Atalantis" as a serious history, and therefore we shall not trouble our readers with matters of such remote interest as the errors and anachronisms with which the chapter that affects to tell our earlier history abounds. Our readers would take no great interest in a discussion whether Hengist was as fabulous as Hercules, Alaric a Christian born, and "the fair chapels of New College and St. George" at Windsor of the same date. But there is one subject in that chapter on which we cannot refrain from saying a few words--THE CHURCH.

We decline to draw any inferences from this work as to Mr. Macaulay's own religious opinions; but it is our duty to say--and we trust we may do so without offence--that Mr. Macaulay's mode of dealing with the general principle of Church government, and the doctrine, discipline, and influence of the Church of England, cannot fail to give serious pain, and sometimes to excite a stronger feeling than pain, in the mind of every friend to that Church, whether in its spiritual or corporate character.

He starts with a notion that the fittest engine to redeem England from the mischiefs and mistakes of oligarchical feudalism was to be found in the imposing machinery and deception of the Roman Church; overlooking the great truth that it was not the Romish Church, but the genius of Christianity, working its vast but silent change, which was really guiding on the chariot of civilization; but in this broad principle there was not enough of the picturesqueness of detail to captivate his mind. It would not suit him to distinguish between the Church of Christ and the web of corruptions that had grown about her, but could not effectually arrest the benignant influence inherent in her mainspring.

He therefore leads his readers to infer that Christianity came first to Britain with St. Austin, and for aught that Mr. Macaulay condescends to inform us, the existence of a prior Anglo-Saxon Church was a monkish fiction. The many unhappy circ.u.mstances of the position taken up by the Romish Church in its struggles for power--some of them unavoidable, it may be, if such a battle were to be fought--are actually displayed as so many blessings, attainable only by a system which the historian himself condemns elsewhere as baneful and untrue. He maintains these strange paradoxes and contradictions with a pertinacity quite surprising. He doubts whether a true form of Christianity would have answered the purposes of liberty and civilization half so well as the acknowledged duplicities of the Church of Rome.

It may perhaps be doubted whether a purer religion might not have been found a less efficient agent.--i. 23.

There is a point in the life both of an individual and a society at which submission and faith, such as at a later period would be justly called servility and credulity, are useful qualities.--i. 47.

These are specimens of the often exposed fallacies in which he delights to indulge. Place right and wrong in a state of uncertainty by reflected lights, and you may fill up your picture as you like. And such for ever is Mr. Macaulay's principle of art. It is not the elimination of error that he seeks for, but an artistic balance of conflicting forces. And this he pursues throughout: deposing the dignity of the historian for the clever ant.i.thesis of the pamphleteer. At last, on this great and important point of religious history--a point which more than any other influences every epoch of English progress, he arrives at this pregnant and ill.u.s.trative conclusion--

It is difficult to say whether England owes more to the Roman Catholic religion or to the Reformation.--i. 49.

England owes nothing to "the Roman Catholic religion." She owes everything to CHRISTIANITY, which Romanism injured and hampered but could not destroy, and which the Reformation freed at least from the worst of those impure and impeding excrescences.

With regard to his treatment of the Reformation, and especially of the Church of England, it is very difficult to give our readers an adequate idea. Throughout a system of depreciation--we had almost said insult--is carried on: sneers, sarcasms, injurious comparisons, sly misrepresentations, are all adroitly mingled throughout the narrative, so as to produce an unfavourable impression, which the author has not the frankness to attempt directly. Even when obliged to approach the subject openly, it is curious to observe how, under a slight veil of impartiality, imputations are raised and calumnies accredited. For instance, early in the first volume he gives us his view of the English Reformation, as a kind of middle term, emerging out of the antagonist struggles of the Catholics and Calvinists: and it is impossible not to see that, between the three parties, he awards to the Catholics the merit of unity and consistency; to the Calvinists, of reason and independence; to the Anglicans, the lowest motives of expediency and compromise. To enforce this last topic he relies on the inconsistencies, some real and some imaginary, imputed to Cranmer, whose notions of worldly expedience he chooses to represent as the source of the Anglican Church....

Every one of the circ.u.mstances on which we may presume that Mr. Macaulay would rely as justifying these charges has been long since, to more candid judgments, either disproved, explained, or excused, and in truth whatever blame can be justly attributed to any of them, belongs mainly, if not exclusively, to those whose violence and injustice drove a naturally upright and most conscientious man into the shifts and stratagems of self-defence. With the greatest fault and the only crime that Charles in his whole life committed Mr. Macaulay does not reproach him--the consent to the execution of Lord Strafford--that indeed, as he himself penitentially confessed, was a deadly weight on his conscience, and is an indelible stain on his character; but even that guilt and shame belongs in a still greater degree to Mr. Macaulay's patriot heroes.

This leads us to the conclusive plea which we enter to Mr. Macaulay's indictment, namely--that all those acts alleged as the excuses of rebellion and regicide occurred after the rebellion had broken out, and were at worst only devices of the unhappy King to escape from the regicide which he early foresaw. It was really the old story of the wolf and the lamb. It was far down the stream of rebellion that these acts of supposed perfidy on the part of Charles could be said to have troubled it.

But while he thus deals with the lamb, let us see how he treats the wolf. We have neither s.p.a.ce nor taste for groping through the long and dark labyrinth of Cromwell's proverbial duplicity and audacious apostacy: we shall content ourselves with two facts, which, though stated in the gentlest way by Mr. Macaulay, will abundantly justify the opinion which all mankind, except a few republican zealots, hold of that man's sincerity, of whose abilities, wonderful as they were, the most remarkable, and perhaps the most serviceable to his fortunes, was his hypocrisy; so much so, that South--a most acute observer of mankind, and who had been educated under the Commonwealth and Protectorate--in his sermon on "Worldly Wisdom," adduces Cromwell as an instance of "habitual dissimulation and imposture." Oliver, Mr. Macaulay tells us, modelled his army on the principle of composing it of men fearing G.o.d, and zealous for _public liberty_, and in the very next page he is forced to confess that

thirteen years followed in which for the first and the last time the civil power of our country was subjected to military dictation.--i.

120.

Again,

Oliver had made his choice. He had kept the hearts of his soldiers, but he had _broken_ with every other cla.s.s of his fellow citizens.--i.

129.

That is, he had broken through all the promises, pledges, and specious pretences by which he had deceived and enslaved the nation, which Mr.

Macaulay calls with such opportune _navete, his fellow citizens_! Then follows, not a censure of this faithless usurpation, but many laboured apologies, and even defences of it, and a long series of laudatory epithets, some of which are worth collecting as a rare contrast to Mr.

Macaulay's usual style, and particularly to the abuse of Charles, which we have just exhibited.

His _genius and resolution_ made him more _absolute master of his country_ than any of her legitimate Kings had been.--i. 129.

He having cut off the legitimate King's head on a pretence that Charles had wished to make himself _absolutely master of the country_.