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oracles of criticism has been confirmed by the reading public, and will be, in our opinion, endorsed by every one who devotes even a few hours to his fascinating volumes.

[Mr. Lecky has in a few years and by four | verdict passed originally by the periodical works gained the right to be regarded as in the front rank of contemporary historians. His books have already attained to something like the position of classics on the subjects with which they deal, and the production of a new volume by him is now a literary event. This high position has been worthily won; the

The record of his life up to the present is brief. William Edward Hartpole Lecky was born in the neighbourhood of Dublin on

March 26, 1838. He went through the usual course in Trinity College; graduated B.A. in 1859, and M.A. in 1863. His first work, The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, was published anonymously in 1861. In this volume the great men who have at different times controlled Irish destinies are passed in review -Swift, Flood and Grattan, O'Connell; and their lives, characters, and influences are discussed with a fairness that is not too often the characteristic of Irish writers on Irish affairs. The work was not acknowledged till 1871-72 when a new edition was published. In 1865 appeared the History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. This work has already passed through several editions. The History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne followed in 1869; and his latest work, published in 1878, are two volumes of A History of England in the Eighteenth Century.

All those works are characterized by the same qualities. A fine power of generalization is combined with a great mastery of detail: a glance at the foot-notes will suffice to show the vast extent of the author's reading. Mr. Lecky has to deal with most of the great moral and philosophical questions which divide the opinions of men; and though one may dissent, and some thinkers have strongly dissented, from his conclusions, no fair reader can deny that they have been arrived at after patient and calm investigation. Mr. Lecky's style is admirably adapted to his subject: clear, correct, simple, yet finished; and, though never ambitious, often truly eloquent.]

DUBLIN IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

(FROM "HISTORY OF ENGLAND."1)

What I have written may be sufficient to show that Irish life in the first half of the

eighteenth century was not altogether the corrupt, frivolous, grotesque, and barbarous thing that it has been represented; that among many and glaring vices some real public spirit and intellectual energy may be discerned. It may be added that great improvements were at this time made in the material aspect of Dublin.

In the middle of the eighteenth century it was in dimensions and population the second

1 This and the following extracts are made by permis

sion of the author.

city in the empire, containing, according to the most trustworthy accounts, between 100,000 and 120,000 inhabitants. Like most things in Ireland, it presented vivid contrasts, and strangers were equally struck with the crowds of beggars, the inferiority of the inns, the squalid wretchedness of the streets of the old town, and with the noble proportions of the new quarter, and the brilliant and hospitable society that inhabited it. The Liffey was spanned by four bridges, and another on a grander scale was undertaken in 1753. St. Stephen's Green was considered the largest square in Europe. The quays of Dublin were widely celebrated; but the chief boast of the city was the new Parliament House, which was built between 1729 and 1739 for the very moderate sum of £34,000, and was justly regarded as far superior in beauty to the Parliament House of Westminster. In the reigns of Elizabeth and of the early Stuarts the Irish Parliament met in the Castle under the eyes of the chief governor. It afterwards assembled at the Tholsel, in Chichester House, and during the erection of the Parliament House in two great rooms of the Foundling Hospital. The new edifice was chiefly built by the surveyorgeneral, Sir Edward Pearce, who was a member of the Irish Parliament, and it entitles him to a very high place among the architects of his time. In ecclesiastical architecture the city had nothing to boast of, for the churches, with one or two exceptions, were wholly devoid of beauty, and their monuments were clumsy, scanty, and mean; but the college, though it wanted the venerable charm of the English universities, spread in stately squares far beyond its original limits. The cheapness of its education and the prevailing distaste for industrial life which induced crowds of poor gentry to send their sons to the university, when they would have done far better to send them to the counter, contributed to support it, and in spite of great discouragement it appears on the whole to have escaped the torpor

which had at this time fallen over the univerof the century to have contained about 700 sities of England. It is said before the middle students. A laboratory and anatomical theatre had been opened in 1710 and 1711. The range of instruction had been about the same time enlarged by the introduction of lectures on chemistry, anatomy, and botany, and a few years later by the foundation of new lectureships on oratory, history, natural and experimental philosophy. The library was assisted by grants from the Irish Parliament. It was

enriched by large collections of books and manuscripts bequeathed during the first half of the eighteenth century by Palliser, Archbishop of Cashel, by Gilbert, the vice-provost and professor of divinity, and by Stearn, the Bishop of Clogher, and its present noble reading-room was opened in 1732. Another library-comprising that which had once belonged to Stillingfleet-had been founded in Dublin by Bishop Marsh, and was incorporated by act of parliament in 1707.

The traces of recent civil war and the arrogance of a dominant minority were painfully apparent. The statue of William III. stood as the most conspicuous monument opposite the Parliament of Ireland. A bust of the same sovereign, bearing an insulting distich reflecting on the adherents of James, was annually painted by the corporation. The toast of "the glorious, pious, and immortal memory" was given on all public occasions by the viceroy. The walls of the House of Lords were hung with tapestry representing the siege of Derry and the battle of the Boyne. A standing order of the House of Commons excluded Catholics even from the gallery. The anniversaries of the Battle of Aghrim, of the Battle of the Boyne, of the Gunpowder Plot, and, above all, of the discovery of the rebellion of 1641, were always celebrated. On the last-named occasion the lord-lieutenant went in full state to Christ's Church, where a sermon on the rebellion was preached. At noon the great guns of the castle were fired. The church bells were rung, and the day concluded with bonfires and illuminations. Like London and Edinburgh, Dublin possessed many elements of disorder, and several men were killed and several others hamstrung or otherwise brutally injured in savage feuds between the Ormond and the Liberty boys, between the students of the university and the butchers around St. Patrick, between the butchers and the weavers, and between the butchers and the soldiers. As in most English towns, bull-baiting was a very popular amusement, and many riots grew out of the determination of the populace to bait cattle that were being brought to market. Occasionally, too, in seasons of great distress there were outbreaks against foreign goods, and shops containing them were sacked. The police of the town seems to have been very insufficient, but an important step was taken in the cause of order by the adoption in 1719 of a new system of lighting the streets after the model of London, which was extended to Cork

and Limerick. Large lanterns were provided at the public expense to be lighted in the dark quarters of the moon from half an hour after sunset till two in the morning; in the other quarters of the moon, during which there had previously been no lights, whenever the moon was down or overshadowed. There was not much industrial life, but the linen trade was flourishing, a linen-hall was built in 1728, and there was also a considerable manufactory of tapestry and carpets.

Among the higher classes there are some traces of an immorality of a graver kind than the ordinary dissipation of Irish life. In the early Hanoverian period a wave of impiety broke over both islands, and great indignation and even consternation was excited in Ireland by the report that there existed in Dublin, among some men of fashion, a club called the "Blasters," or the "Hell-fire Club," resembling the Medmenham brotherhood which some years later became so celebrated in England. It was not of native growth, and is said to have derived its origin, or at least its character, from a painter named Peter Lens, who had lately come into the kingdom, and who was accused of the grossest blasphemy, of drinking the health of the devil, and of openly abjuring God. A committee of the House of Lords inquired into the matter in 1737, and presented a report offering a reward for the apprehension of Lens, and at the same time deploring a great and growing neglect of Divine worship, of religious education, and of the observance of Sunday, as well as an increase of idleness, luxury, profanity, gaming, and drinking. The existence of the Hell-fire Club has been doubted, and the charges against its members were certainly by no means established, but there can be little question that the report of the Lords' Committee was right in its censure of the morals of many of the upper classes. The first Lord Rosse was equally famous for his profligacy and for his wit; and in 1739 Lord Santry was arraigned and found guilty of murder by the House of Lords, for having killed a man in a drunken fray.

The number of carriages in proportion to the population of the city was unusually great. It is said that as many as 300 filled with gentlemen, sometimes assembled to meet the lord-lieutenant on his arrival from England. There were about 200 hackney-carriages and as many chairs, and it was noticed as a singularity of Dublin, which may be ascribed either to the wretched pavement or to the

prevailing habits of ostentation, that ladies scarcely ever appeared on foot in the streets. They were famous for their grace in dancing, as the men were for their skill in swimming. The hospitality of the upper classes was notorious, and it was by no means destitute of brilliancy or grace. No one can look over the fugitive literature of Dublin in the first half of the eighteenth century without being struck with the very large amount of admirable witty and satirical poetry that was produced. The curse of absenteeism was little felt in Dublin, where the Parliament secured the presence of most of the aristocracy and of much of the talent of the country; and during the residence of the viceroy the influence of a court, and the weekly balls in the winter time at the castle, contributed to the sparkling, showy character of Dublin society. Dorset, Devonshire, and Chesterfield were especially famous for the munificence of their hospitality, and the unnatural restriction of the spheres of political and industrial enterprise had thrown the energies of the upper classes to an unhealthy degree into the cultivation of social habits.

lers, and which had undoubtedly bad moral effects, were merely the natural result of the economical condition of the country, which made both food and labour extremely cheap. Another difference which was perhaps more significant was the greater mixture of professions and ranks; and the social position of artists and actors was perceptibly higher than in England. Handel was at once received with an enthusiastic cordiality, and Elrington, one of the best Irish actors of his day, refused an extremely advantageous offer from London in 1729, chiefly on the ground that in his own country there was not a gentleman's house to which he was not a welcome visitor.

Booksellers were numerous; and the house of Faulkner, the friend and publisher of Swift, was for many years a centre of literary society. For the most part, however, they were not occupied with native productions, but were employed in fabricating cheap editions of English books. As the act of Anne for the protection of literary property did not extend to Ireland, this proceeding was legal, the most prominent English books were usually reprinted in Dublin, and great numbers of these reprints passed to the colonies. It is an amusing fact that when Richardson endeavoured to prevent the piracy by sending over for sale a large number of copies of Pamela immediately on its publication, he was accused of having scandalously invaded the legitimate profits of the Dublin printers. The Dublin News-letter, which seems to have been the first local newspaper, was published as early as 1685. Pue's Occurrences, which obtained a much greater popularity, appeared in 1703, and there were several other papers before the middle of the century.

On the whole, however, the difference between society in Dublin and in London was probably much less than has been supposed. Mrs. Delany, who moved much in both, and whose charming letters furnish some of the best pictures of Irish life in the first half of the eighteenth century, writing from Dublin in 1731, says: "As for the generality of people that I meet with here, they are much the same as in England-a mixture of good and bad. All that I have met with behave themselves very decently according to their rank; now and then an oddity breaks out, but never so extraordinary but that I can match them in Eng- The taste for music was stronger and more land. There is a heartiness among them that general than the taste for literature. There is more like Cornwall than any I have known, was a public garden for musical entertainand great sociableness." Arthur Young, nearly ments after the model of Vauxhall; a musichalf a century later, when drawing the dark hall, founded in 1741; a considerable society picture I have already quoted of the reckless of amateur musicians, who cultivated the art and dissipated character of the Irish squireens, and sang for charities; a musical academy, took care to qualify it by adding that "there established in 1755, and presided over by are great numbers of the principal people re- Lord Mornington. Foreign artists were always siding in Ireland who are as liberal in their warmly welcomed. Dubourg, the violinist, ideas as any people in Europe," and that "a the favourite pupil of Geminiani, came to man may go into a vast variety of families Dublin in 1728, and resided there for many which he will find actuated by no other prin- years. Handel, as we have seen, first brought ciples than those of the most cultivated polite-out his Messiah in Dublin. Roubillac, at a ness and the most liberal urbanity. The ostentatious profusion of dishes and multiplication of servants at Irish entertainments which appeared so strange to English travel

time when he was hardly known in England, executed busts for the university. Geminiani came to Dublin about 1763. Garrick acted "Hamlet" in Dublin before he attempted it in

England. There were two theatres, and a | a man;" and long years after Pitt had been great, and indeed extravagant, passion for removed from office, it was observed that the good acting. Among the dramatists of the mere mention of the probability of his returnseventeenth century Congreve and Farquhar ing to power was sufficient to quell the boasts were both Irish by education, and the second, of the French. At the same time he never at least, was Irish by birth. Among the Irish appears to have been regarded in France with actors and actresses who attained to great the intensity of hatred which was bestowed eminence on the English stage during the upon his son. The magnanimous and generous eighteenth century we find Wilkes, who was features of his character, and the somewhat the contemporary and almost the equal of theatrical nature of his greatness, in some deBetterton; Macklin, the first considerable re- gree dazzled even his enemies; and it is reviver of Shakspere; Barry, who was pro- markable that one of the most eloquent eulonounced to be the best lover on the stage; gies of Chatham is from a Frenchman, the Mrs. Woffington, the president of the Beef- Abbé Raynal. steak Club; Mrs. Bellamy, whose memoirs are still read; as well as Elrington, Sheridan, and Mrs. Jordan. The Dublin theatres underwent many strange vicissitudes which it is not necessary here to record, but it may be mentioned as a curious trait of manners that when Sheridan had for a time reformed the chief theatre it was warmly patronized by the Protestant clergy. "There have been sometimes," he stated, more than thirty clergymen in the pit at a time, many of them deans or doctors of divinity, though formerly perhaps none of that order had ever entered the doors, unless a few who skulked in the gallery disguised." In 1701 the fall of a gallery in the theatre during the representation of The Libertine, one of the most grossly immoral of the plays of Shadwell, had produced for a time a religious panic, and the play was for twenty years banished from the stage; but in general there appears to have been little or nothing of that puritanical feeling on the subject which was general in Scotland, and which in the present century became almost equally general among the clergy of Ireland.

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INFLUENCE OF THE ELDER PITT.

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(FROM HISTORY OF ENGLAND.")

Pitt made large demands upon the selfsacrifice and resolution of the nation, but in this respect he was never disappointed. England under his guidance was almost wholly unlike the England of Walpole and Pelham. Its relaxed energies were braced anew. The thick crust of selfishness, corruption, and effeminacy was broken, and an emulation of heroism and enterprise was displayed. Foreign nations cordially recognized the greatness of the change. "England," said Frederick, "had long been in labour, but had at last produced

VOL. IV.

The intellectual and moral qualities that constitute a great war minister and a great home minister are so very different that they have hardly ever been united in the same man. In judging the influence of Pitt on home politics we must remember how short a time he was in power and in health. During the last years of George II., when his authority was so great, the energies of the nation were absorbed in the war; nor did he ever attain in home politics the authority which was willingly conceded him in military administration. In the succeeding reign he was either in opposition, or, being in office, was prostrated by illness. His proposals were seldom or never carried into effect, or even fully elaborated. They were like the unfinished sketches of a great artist, or like beaconlights kindled in the darkness to mark out a path for his successors. That he possessed the qualities of a great home or peace minister can hardly be alleged. In matters of finance and on questions of commercial policy he was extremely ignorant. We look in vain in his career for any great signs of administrative or constructive talent, and he was eminently deficient in the tact, the moderation, and the temper that are requisite for party manageYet even in this sphere he exercised a profound, and on the whole a salutary influence. The most remarkable characteristic of his home policy was the great prominence he gave to the moral side of legislation, or, in other words, the skill with which he acted upon the higher enthusiasms of the people. In his conception of politics the supreme end of legislation is to inspire the nation with a lofty spirit of patriotism, courage, and enterprise; to enlist its nobler qualities habitually in the national service, and to make the legislature a faithful reflex of its sentiments. No preceding statesman showed so full a confidence in the people. It was thus that, by

ment.

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