see why it is that Thomas May is held in such high esteem by English patriots; he has presented the revolution as it appears in fact to them, showing its aims and real causes. What he has said of it-the value which he attributes to itis just that which remains now, and still answers to the ideas and sentiments of his modern readers. What he has misrepresented, or omitted, is that which no personal feelings will lead them to inquire into, and no consideration prompts them to make a rigorous investigation. There are truths which die with the age that witnessed them, and the world would become too wise if it had collected, without any diminution, all those verities which have come to light since men and events have existed.

66

I do not, therefore, wonder that the Whigs of our own day should be so little struck with the adroit partiality which characterises the writings of Thomas May, and eulogise him as a candid and upright" historian. It is even honourable to his intellect, if not to his character, that, writing the history of events which were passing under his eye, he has exhibited an impartiality that belongs to posterity. In no case has he done violent outrage to truth; he has apologised for no crime, nor for any great disorder; he has not wantonly insulted his adversaries. Omission, palliation, dissimulation, is his method and aim; his reason never allows him to attempt more; and if, in his " Breviary," he is more completely chained to a violent faction, I am constrained to believe that it was not without perplexity nor without regret.

Nevertheless, thus much having been said, and this allowance having been made in accommodation to the egoism of men and of ages-an allowance which it were unreasonable to refuse the higher tribunal of truth and justice remains, to which we must finally refer-justice, which in the rigour of its verdict has no respect for persons; truth, knowing neither compromise nor limitation. This is at once the prerogative and the duty of history; only thus can it acquire a moral element. It may hear, understand, and explain all— the empire of circumstance and of passion, the rival claims of conflicting interests, the success or failure of political combinations, and that irresistible current of events which urges men along its course, and exerts so mighty an influence on their conduct and destiny. But history, which must traverse all these paths, must not stop in any-it has a goal to which it

must direct itself. It must determine and judge. In the actions and events which it relates there is good and evil, justice and injustice, wisdom and folly. They have a meaning and a worth; they are either consonant with, or contrary to, the universal order of things, and the eternal laws of the reason. In that valley of Jehoshaphat, where all must descend as they quit the scene, there is a judgment which awaits those who have been the actors, and, in a measure, the authors of history-a judgment supremely wise and equitable, which knows and measures all, determines the sphere of each, and the part which each shall perform-a judgment, in fine, which decides and declares, and illumines with the torch of truth the complicated web of human action and destiny. If history does not light this torch-if, on arriving at its goal, it has no decision to offer, no verdict to bring, it loses its intellectual worth and its moral dignity; it is nought but a frivolous display of empty trifling.

At the same time it loses its practical importance. History can offer to us serious lessons only in so far as it determines and judges. If it merely aims to bring before our eyes the spectacle of human activity without disclosing its meaning and results, it may indeed pretend to amuse us, but it is no longer the lamp of experience guiding our steps onwards into the future by a light reflected from the past.

But to accomplish so lofty an end, to become at once moral and instructive, the virtue of sincerity is pre-eminently necessary. When the lives and liberties of our fellow-men are concerned, the law justly requires a scrupulous exactness in the collection of facts, and in securing at every step of the process publicity and certainty. And history is the tribunal to which the honour and the moral life of men are brought to receive a lasting sentence: its aim is to teach; its voice pronounces a verdict. Conscientiousness, impartiality, perfect ingenuousness, and publicity, are here sacred duties;so much the more sacred, inasmuch as history speaks of those who are departed, and addresses itself to the public, which is more easily duped.

When our civilisation shall have become more diffused and elevated, that public which must finally test those who serve it, which guides and gives morality to the time, will, I doubt not, show itself especially severe and unrelenting towards historians. It will demand from them a due regard to the

morality of their mission, and will inflict a just reprobation on those who perpetuate through ages the illusions of a time of civil discord and faction.

Here it is that we discover the error of Thomas May and his "History of the Long Parliament." We must accord to his work the merit of being important and curious, as it could not fail of being when we consider that it is almost an official history, written as the events which it records occurred, under the direction of the chief actors, and with the design of keeping or regaining the attachment of the English to that cause which was, on the whole, the cause of the country; but it has the vices of hypocrisy and partiality-a cultured partiality, which veils itself under the guise of truth, and avails itself, for purposes of deception, of that uninquiring facility with which even earnest minds often form their opinions when the full and exact knowledge of the truth is no longer for them a matter of immediate and practical interest.

SIR PHILIP WARWICK.

[1608-1683.]

GREAT revolutions meet with a double opposition from enemies to their nature and their mode of development; from those who condemn the end which they pursue, and from those who object to the means which they employ. They concern themselves only with the first, but the second soon become their most formidable adversaries, and it is in the struggle with these that they betray their weakness, until they have learnt to purify and moderate themselves.

We should bestow too much honour on Sir Philip Warwick did we class him with those men who were opposed only to the hypocrisy, the perfidy, the tyranny, the violence of the Revolution of 1640. He was no stranger to the false ideas and unworthy interests of the court of the Stuarts; he did not disapprove of all the illegitimate pretensions of power, and he neither liked nor did he thoroughly understand the general principles which were urged in support of political rights and freedom. Nevertheless, he was not one of those who were

indifferent to the injustice of Charles's government, who entertained no respect for the time-honoured laws and characters of their country, and who adopted the maxims of absolute power with the flippancy of courtiers who expect to gain by it. He is the type and representative of a large class of men, numerous at that time in England, who, without occupying a prominent place in history, yet exerted a real influence on the events of their time; men devoted with an almost superstitious regard to Charles I., yet friends to their country which Charles oppressed; attached to the court, and to the last espousing its cause, yet without having lost all reverence for established laws, all respect for public liberty, never estranged from national interests nor insensible to patriotic emotions. These men constituted the main strength of the Stuart party in England from 1640 to 1688. Unenlightened, yet not servile, stationary rather than biassed by interest, they mingled confusedly the old maxims of Magna Charta with the recent maxims of the courts of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth; they regarded sovereignty as belonging to the king alone, a sovereignty independent of the Parliament; and yet they considered the pretensions of a monarch to rule without a Parliament as dangerous and illegitimate. They repudiated the natural consequences of the Reformation, yet they detested the papacy. They fondly wished to reconcile the royal prerogative carried out according to the pattern of Elizabeth, and the incomplete and compromising revolution as accomplished by Henry VIII., with the downfal of Catholicism and the constitutional liberties handed down from their ancestors. Vain attempt! which led its partisans to shake hands with despotism and imperil the reformation, but which, by a marvel of human inconsistency, did not prevent them from maintaining the independence of their character, the patriotism of their sentiments, and their influence on the nation, with which they could not but identify themselves.

Sir Philip Warwick was one of these men: if his obscure political life gives but little indication of this, his writings, and especially his "Memoirs," do not allow us to doubt it. He was born at London in 1608, and descended from a respectable family of the county of Cumberland. He was brought up at Eton,-afterwards he travelled in France, and resided some time at Geneva. On his return to England he

became private secretary to Juxon, Bishop of London, then Lord Treasurer, and obtained the office of Clerk of the Signet.* Bishop Juxon was, as Warwick says in his Memoirs, one of the most respected and learned men attached to the royal cause. As Lord Treasurer he acted with wisdom and economy, opposing to abuses the honourable though ineffectual resistance of an upright minister, who has only his own virtue to defend him from the feebleness of the monarch and the greediness of courtiers. Young Warwick had at least the advantage of not being connected with a personally vicious administration, and of not himself having formed that habit of misapplying the power conferred by office which so soon corrupts those who are its instruments. Although his post was an unimportant one, it established him at court, where he formed those social connexions which determine both the lot and the opinions of most men, and was sometimes the medium of communication between the minister and the king, whose good-will he thus obtained. In 1640 the borough of Radnor, in Wales, appointed him its representative in the Long Parliament, where he uniformly sided with the Royalist party-conduct which would have earned for him no praise were it not for the displays of courage which it involved, and which he constantly manifested. On the 21st of April, 1641, he was one of the fifty-six members who voted against the bill of attainder by which the Parliament, without the formality of a trial, sent the Earl of Strafford to the scaffold. All the chronicles of the time testify to the danger which was incurred by those who refused thus to lend their assent to a public injustice, the clamour which attended their entrance into or departure from the House, the fury of the mobs by whom they were baited and reviled, and who denounced them by name on placards as "Straffordians, traitors to their country." Such a courage is less rare at the commencement of a revolution than at its close, before character has suffered in the violent shock of untoward experience. Nevertheless it is always difficult and noble to confront a triumphant party, and resist the intimidations of the multi

The signet is one of the seals of the King of England, and is affixed to letters which the king addresses to private individuals and to certain other documents. This seal is always under the guardianship of one of the royal secretaries, and there are four clerks of the signet. By a statute of the 57th year of George the Third (1817), they have been declared ineligible to a seat in Parliament. (See Tomlins's "Dictionary of English Law," 3rd edit., London, 1820.)