Hungary; and to both therefore the conclusion of a peace or a long truce was equally convenient. If, beyond this, there was any gain to either party, it seems to us it was all on the side of Solyman, who, being in actual possession and mastership of the best part of the country concerned, was naturally the most benefited by a condition which did not disturb his possession. Certainly the gain was not on Ferdinand's side. His object, we must remember, when he sent Wranczy and Francis Zay to the Porte, was to secure himself in the possession of Transylvania, which he then held, to obtain possession of Hungary, of which only a small part remained to him, to procure Solyman's recognition of his rights, and in return to pay to the Sultan a large annual tribute of nearly 200,000 ducats. Now, so far from attaining his purposes, he had actually lost Transylvania, he was no nearer possession of Hungary than he was before, and he still had to pay an annual tribute of 30,000 ducats for such parts of Hungary as he continued to hold. He had not advanced a single step nearer his object. The one substantial advantage that the treaty promised was the eight years' truce, and this, as we have said, was an advantage to both parties alike; and even with regard to this, it was only good for just so long as both parties chose to keep it good. As a matter of fact, the peace did not last two years, being broken on Ferdinand's death-not by Solyman, to whose good faith even his enemies have borne testimony-but by Maximilian, Ferdinand's son and successor.

But such was the treaty of 1562-a treaty which secured as well as it could a truce for a limited number of years, but which secured nothing else; and we are unable therefore to assign to it that degree of praise with which it is commended by De Busbecq's present biographers. Nor have they taken, as it seems to us, an accurate view of the object of De Busbecq's embassy. That object, they say, was to stay by the arts of diplomacy the advance of the Asiatic conqueror, to neutralize in the Cabinet the defeats of Essek and Mohacz;' and in attaining this they consider that De Busbecq was to a great extent successful. Now the advance of the Turkish conquest after the great disaster at Mohacz was stayed, not in the Cabinet, but before the walls of Vienna; not by diplomacy on the Bosphorus, but by the practical subjugation to the Ottoman rule of the greater part of Hungary; and the object of De Busbecq's mission was not to stay the course of conquest which was no longer running that way, but to make good, if he could, his master's claims, hereditary and otherwise, to Hungary and Transylvania, in which object, as we have seen, he did not at all succeed.

In

In saying this, we have no intention of calling in question De Busbecq's abilities as a diplomatist, or the value of his services at Constantinople. Our object has been to place in its proper light the story of his embassy in its relation to the important events with which it is connected, and as part of the interesting chapter of history to which it belongs. The course of events had decided the situation, and had placed it beyond De Busbecq's power either to change or to control it. The destinies of Hungary and Transylvania had been decided at Mohacz and Buda, and for Ferdinand to expect that Solymanthe conqueror who had told the Grand Master of Rhodes, in releasing him, that he made war 'not to heap up wealth and riches, but for honour, fame, and immortality; not upon a greedy and covetous mind, but for the honourable desire of rule and sovereignty'-that this same Solyman would be moved to let go his hold upon the countries which he had acquired by the sword for the pecuniary consideration of an annual tribute of ducats, was wholly to misunderstand the character of the Sovereign with whom he was dealing and the genius of the Ottoman Empire in its proudest days. De Busbecq, in trying to give effect to Ferdinand's wishes, was contending for an impossible thing. But his stay at Constantinople, and the tact with which he conducted his mission, had the effect of diminishing the strain between the two Governments, and at length of bringing about a temporary accommodation. As a diplomatist, it is evident he acquitted himself with a rare skill. He was placed in an exceedingly delicate and disagreeable position, and in it he showed a tact, a temper, and a judgment, which enabled him, whilst never surrendering his master's interests, to smooth the relations with the Porte, and to secure for himself the esteem of Roostem and the friendship of Ali Pasha.

But the most valuable result of his embassy is, we repeat, in our judgment, to be found in the charming letters which record it. We cannot read these letters without feeling that we are listening to a very remarkable man-not only a diplomatist, not only a scholar and a man of letters, but a man of keen and cultivated intelligence, of broad sympathies, and of a liberality of mind which may have been due, as his biographers suggest, to his early association with the friends and disciples of Erasmus-but which is certainly about the last thing we would look for in an ambassador from a German Cæsar to a Turkish Sultan in the sixteenth century. The variety of his character is thus graphically described by his present biographers :

'He was eminently what is called "a many-sided man;" nothing is above him, nothing is beneath him. His political information is important to the soberest of historians, his gossiping details would

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gladden a Macaulay; the Imperial Library at Vienna is rich with manuscripts and coins of his collection. To him scholars owe the first copy of the famous "Monumentum Ancyranum." We cannot turn to our gardens without seeing the flowers of Busbecq around us -the lilac, the tulip, the syringa. So much was the first of these associated with the man who first introduced it to the West, that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre proposed to change its name from lilac to Busbequia. Throughout his letters will be found hints for the architect, the physician, the philologist, and the statesman; he has stories to charm a child, and tales to make a greybeard weep.'

The historical interest and the literary merits that belong to the Turkish Letters' of De Busbecq are such as, in our opinion, to entitle them to a permanent place on the shelves of any library. The latter quality will be its own witness to every reader of the book; the former is enhanced by the marvellous contrast between now and then, the wonderful revolution, of which our own age has witnessed what appear to be almost the closing scenes. We are not about to re-open the well-worn theme-infandum renovare dolorem—but we are sure of this, that all who wish to comprehend the Eastern Question will gain much and lose nothing by viewing the Ottoman power in its full historical continuity, in the climax of its glory as well as the depth of its abasement. Not the least striking of the lessons thus brought home to us, is the tangled web of policy which has always been in process of weaving behind the screen of religious antagonism between the Crescent and the Cross. In the age when all Christendom was invoked to repulse the conquering Islamites from the walls of Vienna, when Protestant England prayed for deliverance from her two great spiritual foes in the noble strains of Luther's 'Pope and Turk Tune,' Christian powers were cringing to the Porte for their own purposes, and invoking its aid against each other. Centuries roll on, witnessing scene after scene in the same drama; the parts often shifting; but all gradually becoming subordinate to the one persistent policy bent, under the mask of the championship of Christendom, on fulfilling the prophecy inscribed nearly a thousand years ago on the equestrian statue in the square of Taurus. And still we see the long teaching of history neutralized by religious zeal and political sentimentalism, till the foremost of the free states of Europe joins hands in a course of which the one tendency is to gratify the ambition of the most despotic, and to imperil the true interests of all. Religious zeal is invoked as the motive principle of our conduct towards the power which has long been as harmless to Christendom as Bunyan's giant Pope; and statesmen turn a deaf ear to the one rule of policy, which bids a nation to have supreme regard for its own safety and honour. ART.

ART. V.—A History of England in the Eighteenth Century. By William Edward Hartpole Lecky. Volumes Third and Fourth. London, 1882.

BOS

OSWELL relates that, in comparing Richardson and Fielding, Johnson said 'there is as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dialplate.' Johnson had a strong prejudice against Fielding, and the illustration might be more appositely employed to mark the difference between two schools of history, the narrative and the philosophical: between the writers who are mainly if not exclusively occupied with events, and those who penetrate or profess to penetrate below the surface, who undertake to trace and explain the causes and processes by which successive changes of government, institutions, laws, manners, or modes of thinking, have been brought about. Mr. Lecky belongs to the philosophical school. I have not attempted,' he says in his Preface, 'to write the history of the period I have chosen year by year, or to give a detailed account of military events or of the minor personal and party incidents which form so large a part of political annals. It has been my object to disengage from the mass of facts those which relate to the permanent forces of the nation, or which indicate the more enduring features of national life.' The growth or decline of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the democracy, with the increasing power of Parliament and the press, are specified amongst the principal subjects of his work; and it so happens that the period included in the two volumes of his continuation is precisely that in which the relative position of the monarchy towards the other estates of the realm was eventually fixed upon a well-understood basis,-in which the press, after an animated struggle, succeeded in letting in the dreaded light of publicity on the proceedings of both branches of the Legislature. The revolt of the North American colonies, their Declaration of Independence, and the Volunteer movement in Ireland, also fall within this section of the work.

Mr. Lecky's first and second volumes, covering sixty years, brought us down to the death of George II. The third and fourth (now before us) comprise only twenty-four years, from 1760 to 1784; but it by no means follows that, considering the growing importance of the topics, they have been allowed to occupy an undue space. His mode of treatment implies fulness; and with formidable competitors in the field he could not afford

They were reviewed in the 'Quarterly Review' of April 1878, No. 290.

to

to fall behind them in information or illustration, or to gloss over anything that was essential to the complete development of his views. It is highly to his praise that, fresh from the reperusal of Lord Stanhope and Mr. Massey, who also have looked below the dial-plate, we were able to follow with unabated interest his comments and speculations on the same events, and to derive both pleasure and instruction from observing how minds of a widely different order are struck by them. The manner of introducing the subject of the new reign is strikingly characteristic of the writers. Lord Stanhope's opening paragraph runs thus:

'The young Prince of Wales-henceforth King George III.—was riding with Lord Bute in the neighbourhood of Kew, when a groom first brought him tidings of his grandfather's decease. Ere long, the groom was followed by Pitt, as Secretary of State. His Majesty, after returning to Kew, proceeded to Carlton House, the residence of the Princess Dowager, to meet the Privy Council, and according to ancient form to read them a short Address, which he had directed Bute to prepare. Next morning he was proclaimed in London with the usual solemnities. On this and the ensuing days the demeanour of the young monarch was generally and justly extolled. He seemed neither elated, nor yet abashed and perplexed, by his sudden accession: all he said or did was calm and equable, full of graciousness and goodness. The Address to his Council was well and feelingly delivered, and he dismissed the guards from himself to wait on his grandfather's body.'

Here the four principal actors in the coming scenes are appropriately brought upon the stage.

Mr. Lecky starts, somewhat heavily laden, with a dissertation on forms of government, gradually leading by carefully considered steps to the conclusion (which few will dispute) that the form we live under, as administered by our present gracious Sovereign, is the best.

The problem of combining stability, capacity, and political freedom, has, in modern constitutional monarchies of the English type, been most fully met by a careful division of powers. The sovereignty is strictly hereditary, surrounded by a very large amount of reverence, and sheltered by constitutional forms from criticism or opposition, but at the same time it is so restricted in its province that it has, or ought to have, no real influence on legislation. The King, according to a fundamental maxim, "can do no wrong." The re

*

History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles." By Lord Mahon (Earl Stanhope). In seven volumes. Second edition. 1854. A History of England during the Reign of George the Third.' By William Massey, M.P. Four volumes. 1863. Adolphus is more of an annalist, but his continuation of Smollett is a valuable repository of facts.

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