rest that night was broken, but on the following morning he rose, as usual, early." (i. 429.)

He was seized with apoplexy as he was dressing; was reconciled to the Church of Rome, and received the viaticum on the Thursday following; and died the day afterwards.

Mr. Macaulay's characters of James I. and Charles I. and of the statesmen of the reign of the latter, are in many respects worthy of study. They seem to us a little overdrawn, but we shall probably give our readers an opportunity of judging of them for themselves on a future occasion.

The second chapter is devoted to the character and reign of Charles II. The third chapter is one of the most amusing in the work. It contains a delineation of the state of England under Charles II. The social and domestic condition of the clergy and gentry, and of the great towns; the extent and general features of London, with its defective police and lighting, its Alsatias, and its coffee-houses; the means of internal communication by roads and stage coaches, with the associated facilities afforded by inns, and the terrors excited by highwaymen; the post office, with its newspapers and news letters; the condition of literature; and, finally, the state of the common people-all these are put before us in a multitude of facts, carefully derived and condensed from a variety of sources, and are contrasted with the England and the London of Victoria, in a way which will be found very instructive and agreeable by the majority of readers. For our own parts, we must own that the detail left upon our minds an impression of cleverness rather than of solidity. Pleasant as it is, it would have been more to our taste if, like Hume's somewhat similar papers, it had been thrown into an appendix, rather than placed as an interruption to the flow of the narrative.

The fourth chapter is, properly speaking, the commencement of the history. It contains a narrative of the accession of James II. and a detail of his first steps towards the introduction of Popery. The fifth chapter relates to the rebellions of Argyle and Monmouth, and may be pointed out as a most admirable narrative. The follow

ing minute account of Monmouth's entry into Taunton is a fair specimen of Mr. Macaulay's manner.

"While the parliament was devising sharp laws against Monmouth and his partisans, he found at Taunton a reception which might well encourage him to hope that his enterprise would have a other towns in the south of England, was prosperous issue. Taunton, like most in that age more important than at present. Those towns have not indeed de.. clined. On the contrary they are, with very few exceptions, larger and richer, better built and better peopled, than in the seventeenth century. But, though they have positively advanced, they have relatively gone back. They have been far outstripped in wealth and population by the great manufacturing and commercial time of the Stuarts were but beginning to cities of the north, cities which in the be known as seats of industry. When Monmouth marched into Taunton it was an eminently prosperous place. Its markets were plentifully supplied. It was a celebrated seat of the woollen manufacture. The people boasted that they lived in a land flowing with milk and honey. Nor was this language held only by partial natives, for every stranger who Magdalene owned that he saw beneath climbed the graceful tower of St. Mary him the most fertile of English valleys. It was a country rich with orchards and green pastures, among which were scattered in gay abundance manor houses, cottages, and village spires. The townsmen had long leaned towards Presbyterian divinity and Whig politics. In the great civil war Taunton had, through all vicissitudes, adhered to the parliament, had been twice closely besieged by Goring, and had been twice defended with heroic valour

by Robert Blake, afterwards the renowned

Whole

admiral of the Commonwealth. streets had been burned down by the mortars and grenades of the Cavaliers. Food had been so scarce that the resolute

governor had announced his intention to put the garrison on rations of horse flesh. But the spirit of the town had never been subdued either by fire or by hunger. The Restoration had produced no effect on the temper of the Taunton men. They

had still continued to celebrate the anni. versary of the happy day on which the siege laid to their town by the royal army

had been raised; and their stubborn attachment to the old cause had excited so much fear and resentment at Whitehall that, by a royal order, their moat had been filled up, and their wall demolished to the foundation. The puritanical spirit had

been kept up to the height among them by the precepts and example of one of the most celebrated of the dissenting clergy,

Joseph Alleine. Alleine was the author

of a tract entitled, An Alarm to the Unconverted,' which is still popular both in England and in America. From the gaol to which he was consigned by the vic torious Cavaliers, he addressed to his

loving friends at Taunton many epistles breathing the spirit of a truly heroic piety.

His frame soon sunk under the effects of study, toil, and persecution; but his memory was long cherished with exceeding love and reverence by those whom he had exhorted and catechised. The children of the men who forty years before had manned the ramparts of Taunton against the Royalists now welcomed Monmouth with transports of joy and affection. Every door and window was adorned with wreaths of flowers. No man appeared in the streets without wearing in his hat a green bough, the badge of the popular cause. Damsels of the best families in

the town wove colours for the insurgents. One flag in particular was embroidered gorgeously with emblems of royal dignity, and was offered to Monmouth by a train of young girls. He received the gift with the winning courtesy which distinguished him. The lady who headed the procession presented him also with a small Bible of great price, He took it with a show of reverence. I come,' he said, 'to defend the truths contained in this book, and to seal them, if it must be so, with my blood.'"' (i. 585.)

The weakness of Monmouth, and the wickedness of Jeffreys, were never portrayed more vividly than by Mr. Macaulay; but we can only point attention to the passages. The account of the interview between James and Monmouth (i. 622), and that of the trial of Alice Lisle (i. 639), are masterpieces in their way.

The second volume contains six chapters, numbered in continuation of those in vol. I. Chapter vi. details James's quarrel with his parliament respecting the dispensing power, and the way in which he proceeded to make his ecclesiastical supremacy conduce to the destruction of the English Church.

Chapter vii. brings before us the hero of the work, William Prince of Orange. The character of this great prince is one of Mr. Macaulay's chefs d'œuvre. Bishop Burnet is defended with zeal and success, and the sketches of Dryden, Bunyan, and Churchill,

afterwards Duke of Marlborough, are most admirable.

Chapter viii. gives the history of the dispute with Magdalene college, Oxford, and the trial of the seven bishops, in the book. No history, no book, and is perhaps on the whole the best that we are acquainted with, contains anything like so clear a picture of the condition of the country, or lets one so entirely into the state of feeling which pervaded all classes of the people.

Chapter ix. contains the preparations and landing of William, his entry into Exeter, his advance eastward, the desertions to him, James's vain endeavours to stay his flying friends, all eager to worship the rising sun, his sending away the Queen and the Prince of Wales, and finally, his own flight.

The last chapter relates the proceedings of the Convention Parliament, the landing of Mary, and the proclamation of the new King and Queen.

It will be seen that the work relates

in the main to a portion of our history

which has been often told before, and one which is naturally an especial favourite with writers of the political school of Mr. Macaulay. Whig historians have been proud to detail minutely the greatest triumph of their party. It has been a delight to them to set forth in worthy style the immortal praises of their sovereign hero. Among modern writers upon this theme, two celebrated Whigs will be remembered by every one,-Charles James Fox and Sir James Mackintosh. Both their works were left incomplete, and that of the latter, having been continued in a very different spirit, has never been sufficiently appreciated. It was remarkable for bringing to light a variety of materials, principally consisting of diplomatic correspondence, which had never been made known before. But the portion of that correspondence which Sir James Mackintosh used in his incomplete work was but a very small part of the whole that he had collected. His papers had been procured with great diligence and judgment, and at great expense, from France, Holland, Italy, and various private depositories in our own country; and every one who has

inspected them has declared that they form a collection of inestimable value. All the materials, collected both by Mr. Fox and Sir James Mackintosh, have been very properly confided to Mr. Macaulay.

66

At length, therefore, this great Whig achievement has been so far completely described by a competent Whig historian, and we may well believe that a mind so acute and so honest as Mr. Macaulay's has left nothing of much importance for any subsequent writer to glean from the valuable materials submitted to him. Mr. Macaulay has treated his subject with very obvious Whig fervour. Over-admiration for Whig greatness, over-leniency to Whig faults, and some little difficulty in perceiving the virtues of Tories (when they chance to possess any), are settled qualities of Mr. Macaulay's mind, and on fitting occasions do not fail to appear in his History. Thus, for instance, although he does not omit to state that Lord William Russell and Algernon Sydney were mean and indelicate enough" to accept secret money-pensions from the French King, yet he cannot by any means allow that they took bribes, or that, if they did, they meant anything wrong in so doing. "It would be unjust," he says, "to impute to them the extreme wickedness of taking bribes to injure their country." Oh dear no, they did not mean to do anything of the kind! "On the contrary," Mr. Macaulay continues, "they meant to serve her." Exactly so; but if the culprit had been any poor man who was enough of an enthusiast to believe in an all-regulating Providence and pretend to a conscience, Mr. Macaulay would not have failed to tell him, "The interests of France and England were obviously opposed. If you accepted French gold with the intention of serving England, you wronged the King of France; if you took it in order to do service to France, you were a traitor to England. One way you were a rogue-the other a hired slave; both ways a hypocrite."

Another recent work upon the period in question, of which we are reminded by the book before us, is the concluding volume of Dr. Lingard. One would have thought that the period was a critical one to be treated by a gentleman of Dr. Lingard's opi

nions, but Romanism is never at a loss. If James II. had succeeded, the Church of Rome would have canonized him. He failed, and she all but disowns him. All the odium is thrown upon Sunderland and Father Petre. They were "lying spirits," by whom the good but foolish king was bewitched. The story is told with a smooth and elegant plausibility. Nothing wrong is found in the condemnation of Alice Lisle; nothing illegal in James's Ecclesiastical Commission; and the king, it is left to be inferred, was much deceived and very hardly used by the Church of England. To all such misrepresentations Mr. Macaulay's work is the most triumphant of answers.

It also vindicates the conduct of most of the dissenting_bodies at that critical period, when James tempted them by the declaration of indulgence. There is no doubt that in the first instance many of them united in addresses of gratitude to the king, but even at that time the most respectable amongst them stood aloof; and, as soon as the king's plans were fully developed, the Dissenters were ashamed of themselves for having ever given him any encouragement. Magdalen college opened their eyes. Thenceforth they cast in their lot with the ministers of the Church, and joined them heartily when the king put forth the second Declaration of Indulgence. The proof offered upon this point seems conclusive. (ii. 214, 336, 347.)

One Dissenter fails to come within Mr. Macaulay's powers of vindication -William Penn. The name is an illustrious one, but of late years it has lost much of its attractiveness. Sir James Mackintosh was the first to point attention to the conduct of the courtly Quaker in reference to the poor Taunton girls, most of them under ten years of age, who, under the direction of a foolish schoolmistress, had delivered the flag and bible to Monmouth. Several of them died in prison, and some of fright. The survivors were excepted by name from the king's general pardon, in order that they might be compelled to purchase separate pardons each for herself. The money to be extorted from them in this way was given by the king to the queen's maids of honour, who anxiously looked around for some one who could screw out of

the friends of the unhappy children the largest possible sum. An endeavour was made to get Sir Francis Warre, a country gentleman resident in the neighbourhood, to take him upon the office. He refused, declaring that he did not think it a business in which it became him to be employed. 70007. was the sum which the maids of honour had set their hearts upon obtaining. William Penn-we blush to write the fact the founder of Pennsylvania, submitted to be appointed the agent of the maids of honour, and actually ac cepted from them a written paper of instructions which authorised him to make the most advantageous composition he could in their behalf. His eloquence could only obtain for his heartless clients something less than a third part of what they had demanded. "It should seem," remarks Mr. Macaulay, "that a little of the pertinacious scrupulosity which he had often shown about taking off his hat would not have been altogether out of place on this occasion." Penn's attempt to cajole the Magdalene men into submission to the king was scarcely less discreditable. There seems no doubt, indeed, that Burnet has described him accurately as a vain, talking man, mightily pleased to be employed in any office of seeming importance, and not over scrupulous, provided he could keep himself about the court. When

Crewe, Bishop of Durham, was remonstrated with, for acting under James's illegal ecclesiastical commission, he replied, "I cannot live out of the royal smile." Such was the feeling of William Penn. The one consented to oppress the Church of which he was a bishop, the other to act in similar contradiction to the principles of his sect, and even to the principles of all religion, for the satisfaction of having the entrée at a court which neither of them had the wit to see was tottering even to its downfall.

From many passages of local interest we will select one, by way of showing what variety Mr. Macaulay has contrived to crowd into his pages. The passage seems to us to be eminently beautiful, although it is rather a production of the eloquent, reflective essayist than of the historian. minds us of the Sketch Book.

It re

THE CHAPEL IN THE TOWER. "Death is there associated, not as in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public veneration, and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with every thing that is most endearing in social and domestic charities; but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny,-with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude and cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame. Thither have been carried, through successive ages, by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following, the bleeding relics of men who had been the captains of armies, the leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of courts. Thither was borne, before the window where Jane Grey was praying, the mangled corpse of Guildford Dudley. Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and Protector of the realm, reposes there by the brother whom he murdered. There has mouldered away the headless trunk of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and Cardinal of Saint Vitalis, a man worthy to have lived in a better age, and to have died in a better cause. There are laid John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, Lord High Admiral, and Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, Lord High Treasurer [Chamberlain ?]. There, too, is another Essex, on whom nature and fortune had lavished all their bounties in vain, and whom valour, grace, genius, royal favour, popular applause, conducted to an early and ignominious doom. Not far off, sleep two chiefs of the great house of Howard, Thomas fourth Duke of Norfolk, and Philip eleventh Earl of Arundel. Here and there, among the thick graves of unquiet and aspiring statesmen, lie more delicate sufferers-Margaret of Salisbury, the last of the proud name of Plantagenet, and those two fair queens who perished by the jealous rage of Henry. Such was the dust with which the dust of Monmouth mingled." (i. 628.)

Mr. Macaulay has written a most valuable book. It is a political and a party book-the book of a philosopher in religion, and a Whig in politics. We should have preferred it if it had not been written with such an obvious bearing upon party politics; but in style, in anxious and careful consideration of authorities, in varied and eloquent illustration, and as a bold, manly defence of the author's own political views, it is a work of great merit, and cannot fail to be widely and lastingly popular.