Chapter VIII: Part 8

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 illustration, 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 classical 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 illustration. 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 class 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 principal 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 circumstantial 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 trimmings 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 circumstance of his hating the individuals of the opposite party as bitterly, as passionately, 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 massacre 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 constitution--on the causes by which the monarchy of the Tudors passed, 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 constitution--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 constitutional 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, dispassionate narrative, upon the model of the most passionate 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 nobody 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 attitude 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 title is "_Angliae_ [or, after the Scotch Union, _Magnae Britanniae_] _Notitia, 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 passages 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 assertions 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 Institution 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 drôle 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 transmute it playfully into "_the rogue startled me_"; but if a _Tory_, it would take a deeper dye, and we should find "_the villain assaulted 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 circumstances 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 antithesis 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 illustrative 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 circumstances 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 space 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 God, 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 class 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 _naïveté, 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_.

Everything yielded to the _vigour and ability_ of Cromwell.--i. 130.

The Government, though in the form of a Republic, was in truth a
despotism, moderated only by the _wisdom, the sober-mindedness, and
the magnanimity_ of the despot.--i. 137.

With a vast deal more of the same tone.

But Mr. Macaulay particularly expatiates on the influence that Cromwell exercised over foreign states: and there is hardly any topic to which he recurs with more pleasure, or, as we think, with less sagacity, than the terror with which Cromwell and the contempt with which the Stuarts inspired the nations of Europe. He somewhat exaggerates the extent of this feeling, and greatly misstates or mistakes the cause; and as this subject is in the present state of the world of more importance than any others in the work, we hope we may be excused for some observations tending to a sounder opinion on that subject.

It was not, as Mr. Macaulay everywhere insists, the personal abilities and genius of Cromwell that exclusively, or even in the first degree, carried his foreign influence higher than that of the Stuarts. The internal struggles that distracted and consumed the strength of these islands throughout their reigns necessarily rendered us little formidable to our neighbours; and it is with no good grace that a Whig historian stigmatises that result as shameful; for, without discussing whether it was justifiable or not, the fact is certain, that it was opposition of the Whigs--often in rebellion and always in faction against the Government--which disturbed all progress at home and paralysed every effort abroad. We are not, we say, now discussing whether that opposition was not justifiable and may not have been ultimately advantageous in several constitutional points; we think it decidedly was: but at present all we mean to do is to show that it had a great share in producing on our foreign influence the lowering effects of which Mr. Macaulay complains.

And there is still another consideration which escapes Mr. Macaulay in his estimate of such usurpers as Cromwell and Buonaparte. A usurper is always more terrible both at home and abroad than a legitimate sovereign: first, the usurper is likely to be (and in these two cases was) a man of superior genius and military glory, wielding the irresistible power of the sword; but there is still stronger contrast-- legitimate Governments are bound--at home by laws--abroad by treaties, family ties, and international interests; they acknowledge the law of nations, and are limited, even in hostilities, by many restraints and bounds. The despotic usurpers had no fetters of either sort--they had no opposition at home, and no scruples abroad. Law, treaties, rights, and the like, had been already broken through like cobwebs, and kings naturally humbled themselves before a vigour that had dethroned and murdered kings, and foreign nations trembled at a power that had subdued in their own fields and cities the pride of England and the gallantry of France! To contrast Cromwell and Charles II, Napoleon and Louis XVIII, is sheer nonsense and mere verbiage--it is as if one should compare the house-dog and the wolf, and argue that the terror inspired by the latter was very much to his honour. All this is such a mystery to Mr. Macaulay that he wanders into two theories so whimsical, that we hesitate between passing them by as absurdities, or producing them for amusement; we adopt the latter. One is that Cromwell could have no interest and therefore no personal share in the death of Charles. "Whatever Cromwell was," says Mr. Macaulay, "he was no fool; and he must have known that Charles I was obviously a less difficulty in his way than Charles II." Cromwell, we retain the phrase, "was no fool," and he thought and _found_ that Charles II, was, as far as he was concerned, no difficulty at all. The real truth was, that the revolutionary party in England in 1648, like that in France in 1792, was but a rope of sand which nothing could cement and consolidate but the _blood of the Kings--that_ was a common crime and a common and indissoluble tie which gave all their consistency and force to both revolutions--a stroke of original sagacity in Cromwell and of imitative dexterity in Robespierre. If Mr. Macaulay admits, as he subsequently does (i. 129), that the regicide was "a sacrament of blood," by which the party became irrevocably bound to each other and separated from the rest of the nation, how can he pretend that Cromwell derived no advantage from it? In fact, his admiration--we had almost said fanaticism--for Cromwell betrays him throughout into the blindest inconsistencies.

The second vision of Mr. Macaulay is, if possible, still more absurd. He imagines a Cromwell dynasty! If it had not been for Monk and his army, the rest of the nation would have been loyal to the son of the illustrious Oliver.

Had the Protector and the Parliament been suffered to proceed
undisturbed, there can be little doubt that an order of things similar
to that which was afterwards established under the House of Hanover,
would have been established under the house of Cromwell.--i. 142.

And yet in a page or two Mr. Macaulay is found making an admission-- made, indeed, with the object of disparaging Monk and the royalists--but which gives to his theory of a Cromwellian dynasty the most conclusive refutation.

It was probably not till Monk had been some days in the capital that
he made up his mind. The cry of the whole people was for a free
parliament; and there could _be no doubt that a parliament really free
would instantly restore the exiled family_.--i. 147.

All this hypothesis of a Cromwellian dynasty _looks_ like sheer nonsense; but we have no doubt it has a meaning, and we request our readers not to be diverted by the almost ludicrous partiality and absurdity of Mr. Macaulay's speculations from an appreciation of the deep hostility to the monarchy from which they arise. They are like bubbles on the surface of a dark pool, which indicate there is something rotten below.

We should if we had time have many other complaints to make of the details of this chapter, which are deeply coloured with all Mr. Macaulay's prejudices and passions. He is, we may almost say of course, violent and unjust against Strafford and Clarendon; and the most prominent touch of candour that we can find in this period of his history is, that he slurs over the murder of Laud in an abscure half-line (i. 119) as if he were--as we hope he really is--ashamed of it.

We now arrive at what we have heard called the celebrated third chapter --celebrated it deserves to be, and we hope our humble observations may add something to its celebrity. There is no feature of Mr. Macaulay's book on which, we believe, he more prides himself, and which has been in truth more popular with his readers, than the descriptions which he introduces of the residences, habits, and manners of our ancestors. They are, provided you do not look below the surface, as entertaining as Pepys or Pennant, or any of the many scrap-book histories which have been recently fabricated from those old materials; but when we come to examine them, we find that in these cases, as everywhere else, Mr. Macaulay's propensity to caricature and exaggerate leads him not merely to disfigure circumstances, but totally to forget the principle on which such episodes are admissible into regular history--namely, the illustration of the story. They should be, as it were, woven into the narrative, and not, as Mr. Macaulay generally treats them, stitched on like patches. This latter observation does not of course apply to the collecting a body of miscellaneous facts into a separate chapter, as Hume and others have done; but Mr. Macaulay's chapter, besides, as we shall show, the prevailing inaccuracy of its details, has one general and essential defect specially its own.

The moment Mr. Macaulay has selected for suspending his narrative to take a view of the surface and society of England is the death of Charles II. Now we think no worse point of time could have been chosen for tracing the obscure but very certain connection between political events and the manners of a people. The restoration, for instance, was an era in manners as well as in politics--so was in a fainter degree the Revolution--either, or both, of those periods would have afforded a natural position for contemplating a going and a coming order of things; but we believe that there are no two periods in our annals which were so identical in morals and politics--so undistinguishable, in short, in any national view--as the latter years of Charles and the earlier years of James. Here then is an objection _in limine_ to this famous chapter--and not _in limine_ only, but in substance; for in fact the period he has chosen would not have furnished out the chapter, four-fifths of which belong to a date later than that which he professes to treat of. In short, the chapter is like an old curiosity-shop, into which--no matter whether it happens to stand in Charles Street, William Street, or George Street--the knick-knacks of a couple of centuries are promiscuously jumbled. What does it signify, in a history of the reign of Charles II, that a writer, "_sixty years after the Revolution_" (i. 347), says that in the lodging-houses at Bath "the hearth-slabs" were "freestone, not marble"--that "the best apartments were hung with coarse woollen stuff, and furnished with rush-bottomed chairs"?--nay, that he should have the personal good taste to lament that in those Boeotian days "_not a wainscot was painted_" (348); and yet this twaddle of the reign of George II, patched into the times of Charles II, is the appropriate occasion which he takes to panegyrise this new mode of elucidating history?--...

It is a curious and, to persons of our opinions, not unsatisfactory circumstance, that, though Mr. Macaulay almost invariably applies the term _Tory_ in an opprobrious or contemptuous sense, yet so great is the power of truth in surmounting the fantastical forms and colours laid over it by this brilliant _badigeonneur_, that on the whole no one, we believe, can rise from the work without a conviction that the Tories (whatever may be said of their prejudices) were the honestest and most conscientious of the whole _dramatis personae_; and it is this fact that in several instances and circumstances imprints, as it were by force, upon Mr. Macaulay's pages an air of impartiality and candour very discordant from their general spirit.

We are now arrived at the fourth chapter--really the first, strictly speaking, of Mr. Macaulay's history--the accession of James II, where also Sir James Mackintosh's history commences. And here we have to open to our readers the most extraordinary instance of _parallelism_ between two writers, unacknowledged by the later one, which we have ever seen. Sir James Mackintosh left behind him a history of the Revolution, which was published in 1834, three years after his death, in quarto: it comes down to the Orange invasion, and, though it apparently had not received the author's last corrections, and was clumsily edited, and tagged with a continuation by a less able hand, the work is altogether (bating not a little ultra-Whiggery) very creditable to Mackintosh's diligence, taste, and power of writing; it is indeed, we think, his best and most important work, and that by which he will be most favourably known to posterity. From that work Mr. Macaulay has borrowed largely--prodigally-- helped himself with both hands--not merely without acknowledging his obligation, but without so much as alluding to the existence of any such work. Nay--though this we are sure was never designed--he inserts a note full of kindness and respect to Sir James Mackintosh, which would naturally lead an uninformed reader to conclude that Sir James Mackintosh, though he had _meditated_ such a work, had never even begun writing it. On the 391st page of Mr. Macaulay's first volume, at the mention of the old news-letters which preceded our modern newspapers, Mr. Macaulay says, that "they form a valuable part of the literary treasures collected by the late Sir James Mackintosh"; and to this he adds the following foot-note:

I take this opportunity of expressing my warm gratitude to the family
of my dear and honoured friend Sir James Mackintosh, for confiding to
me the materials collected by him _at a time when he meditated a work
similar to that which I have undertaken._ I have never seen, and I do
not believe that there anywhere exists, within the same compass, so
noble a _collection of extracts_ from public and private archives. The
judgment with which Sir James, in great masses of the rudest ore of
history, selected what was valuable and rejected what was worthless,
can be fully appreciated only by one who has toiled after him in the
same mine.--i. 391.

Could any one imagine from this that Mackintosh had not only _meditated_ a work, but actually written, and that his friends had published, a large closely printed quarto volume, on the same subject, from the same materials, and sometimes in the very same words as Mr. Macaulay's?

The coincidence--the identity, we might almost say--of the two works is so great, that, while we have been comparing them, we have often been hardly able to distinguish which was which. We rest little on the similiarity of facts, for the facts were ready made for both; and Mr. Macaulay tells us that he worked from Mackintosh's materials; there would, therefore, even if he had never seen Mackintosh's work, be a community of topics and authorities; but, seeing as we do in every page that he was writing with Mackintosh's volume before his eyes, we cannot account for his utter silence about it....

Having thus shown Mr. Macaulay's mode of dealing with what forms the chief and most characteristic feature of his book--its anecdotical gossip--we shall now endeavour to exhibit the deceptive style in which he treats the larger historical facts: in truth the style is the same--a general and unhesitating sacrifice of accuracy and reality to picturesque effect and party prejudices. He treats historical personages as the painter does his _layman_--a supple figure which he models into what he thinks the most striking attitude, and dresses up with the gaudiest colours and most fantastical draperies.

It is very difficult to condense into any manageable space the proofs of a general system of accumulating and aggravating all that was ever, whether truly or falsely, reproached to the Tories, and alleviating towards the Whigs the charges which he cannot venture to deny or even to question. The mode in which this is managed so as to keep up some show of impartiality is very dexterous. The reproach, well or ill founded, which he thinks most likely to damage the character of any one he dislikes, is repeated over and over again in hope that the iteration will at last be taken for proof, such as the perfidy of Charles I, the profligacy and selfishness of Charles II, the cold and cruel stupidity of James, the baseness of Churchill, the indecent violence of Rochester, the contemptible subserviency of his brother, Clarendon, and so on through a whole dictionary of abuse on every one whom he takes or mistakes for a Tory, and on a few Whigs whom for some special reasons of his own he treats like Tories. On the other hand, when he finds himself reluctantly forced to acknowledge even the greatest enormity of the Whigs--corruption--treason--murder he finds much gentler terms for the facts; selects a scapegoat, some subaltern villain, or some one whom history has already gibbeted, "to bear upon him all their iniquities," and that painful sacrifice once made, he avoids with tender care a recurrence to so disagreeable a subject....

After so much political detail it will be some kind of diversion to our readers to examine Mr. Macaulay's most elaborate strategic and topographical effort, worked up with all the combined zeal and skill of an ex-Secretary-at-War and a pictorial historian--a copious description of the battle of Sedgemoor. Mr. Macaulay seems to have visited Bridgwater with a zeal worthy of a better result: for it has produced a description of the surrounding country as pompous and detailed as if it had been the scene of some grand strategic operations--a parade not merely unnecessary, but absurd, for the so-called battle was but a bungling skirmish. Monmouth had intended to surprise the King's troops in their quarters by a midnight attack, but was stopped by a wide and deep trench, of which he was not apprised, called Bussex Rhine, behind which the King's army lay. "The trenches which drain the moor are," Mr. Macaulay adds, "in that country called _rhines_." On each side of this ditch the parties stood firing at each other in the dark. Lord Grey and the cavalry ran away without striking a blow; Monmouth followed them, too, soon; for some time the foot stood with a degree of courage and steadiness surprising in such raw and half-armed levies; at last the King's cavalry got round their flank, and they too ran: the King's foot then crossed the ditch with little or no resistance, and slaughtered, with small loss on their own side, a considerable number of the fugitives, the rest escaping back to Bridgwater. Our readers will judge whether such a skirmish required a long preliminary description of the surrounding country. Mr. Macaulay might just as usefully have described the plain of Troy. Indeed at the close of his long topographical and etymological narrative Mr. Macaulay has the tardy candour to confess that--

little is now to be learned by visiting the field of battle, for the
face of the country has been greatly changed, and the old _Bussex
Rhine_, on the banks of which the great struggle took place, has long
disappeared.

This is droll. After spending a deal of space and fine writing in describing the present prospect, he concludes by telling us candidly it is all of no use, for the whole scene has changed. This is like Walpole's story of the French lady who asked for her lover's picture; and when he demurred observing that, if her husband were to see it, it might betray their secret--"O dear, no," she said--just like Mr. Macaulay--"I _will have the picture_, but it _need not be like_!"

But even as to the change, we again doubt Mr. Macaulay's accuracy. The word _Rhine_ in Somersetshire, as perhaps--_parva componere magnis_--in the great German river, means _running_ water, and we therefore think it very unlikely that a running stream should have disappeared; but we also find in the Ordnance Survey of Somersetshire, made in our own time, the course and name of _Bussck's Rhine_ distinctly laid down in front of Weston, where it probably ran in Monmouth's day; and we are further informed, in return to some inquiries that we have caused to be made, that the _Rhine_ is now, in 1849, as visible and well known as ever it was.

But this grand piece of the military topography of a battlefield where there was no battle must have its picturesque and pathetic episode, and Mr. Macaulay finds one well suited to such a novel. When Monmouth had made up his mind to attempt to _surprise_ the royal army, Mr. Macaulay is willing (for a purpose which we shall see presently) to persuade himself that the Duke let the whole town into his secret:--

That an attack was to be made under cover of the night was no secret
in Bridgwater. The town was full of women, who had repaired thither by
hundreds from the surrounding region to see their husbands, sons,
lovers, and brothers once more. There were many sad partings that day;
and many parted never to meet again. The report of the intended attack
came to the ears of a young girl who was zealous for the king. Though
of modest character, she had the courage to resolve that she would
herself bear the intelligence to Feversham. She stole out of
Bridgwater, and made her way to the royal camp. But that camp was not
a place where female innocence could be safe. Even the officers,
despising alike the irregular force to which they were opposed, and
the negligent general who commanded them, had indulged largely in
wine, and were ready for any excess of licentiousness and cruelty. One
of them seized the unhappy maiden, refused to listen to her errand,
and brutally outraged her. She fled in agonies of rage and shame,
leaving the wicked army to its doom.--i. 606, 7.

--the _doom of the wicked army_, be it noted _en passant_, being a complete victory. Mr. Macaulay cites Kennett for this story, and adds that he is "_forced_ to believe the story to be true, because Kennett declares that it was communicated to him in the year 1718 by a brave officer who had fought at Sedgemoor, and had himself seen the poor girl depart in an agony of distress,"--_ib_.

We shall not dwell on the value of an anonymous story told _three-and-thirty years_ after the Battle of Sedgemoor. The tale is sufficiently refuted by notorious facts and dates, and indeed by its internal absurdity. We know from the clear and indisputable evidence of Wade, who commanded Monmouth's infantry, all the proceedings of that day. Monmouth no doubt intended to move that night, and made open preparation for it, and the partings so pathetically described may have, therefore, taken place, and the rather because the intended movement was to leave that part of the country altogether--_not_ to meet the King's troops, but to endeavour to escape them by a forced march across the Avon and into Gloucestershire. So far might have been known. But about _three_ o'clock that afternoon Monmouth received intelligence by a spy that the King's troops had advanced to Sedgemoor, but had taken their positions so injudiciously, that there seemed a possibility of surprising them in a night attack. On this Monmouth assembled a council of war, which agreed that, instead of retreating that night towards the Avon as they had intended, they should advance and attack, provided the spy, who was to be sent out to a new reconnoissance, should report that the troops were not intrenched. We may be sure that--as the news only arrived at three in the afternoon--the assembling the council of war--the deliberation-- the sending back the spy--his return and another deliberation--must have protracted the final decision to so late an hour that evening, that it is utterly impossible that the change of the design of a march northward to that of an "_attack to be made under cover of the night_," could have been that _morning_ no secret in Bridgwater. But our readers see it was necessary for Mr. Macaulay to raise this fable, in order to account for the poor girl's knowing so important a secret. So far we have argued the case on Mr. Macaulay's own showing, which, we confess, was very incautious on our part; but on turning to his authority we find, as usual, a story essentially different. Kennett says--

A brave Captain in the Horse Guards, now living (1718), was in the
action at Sedgemoor, and gave me the account of it:--That on _Sunday
morning, July 5_, a young woman came from Monmouth's quarters to give
notice of his design to surprise the King's camp _that night_; but
this young woman being carried to a chief officer in a neighbouring
village, she was led upstairs and debauched by him, and, coming down
in a great fright and disorder (as he himself saw her), she went back,
and her message was not told.--_Kennett_, in. 432.

This knocks the whole story on the head. Kennett was not aware (Wade's narrative not being published when he wrote) that the King's troops did not come in sight of Sedgemoor till about three o'clock P.M. of that Sunday on the early morning of which he places the girl's visit to the camp, and it was not till late that same evening that Monmouth changed his original determination, and formed the sudden resolution with which, to support Kennett's story, the whole town must have been acquainted at least twelve hours before. These are considerations which ought not to have escaped a philosophical historian who had the advantage, which Kennett had not, of knowing the exact time when these details occurred....