allowed only sixteen days from the order and thirteen from its publication to ascertain the sentiments of their brethren and of their clergy. Resistance could only be formidable if it were general. Their difficulties were increased by the character of the most distinguished laymen whom it was fit to consult. Both Nottingham, the chief of their party, and Halifax, with whom they were now compelled to coalesce, hesitated at the moment of decision.-p. 244. the declaration was to be In the progress of the trial itself there was a great incident. The proof of the delivery of the bishops' remonstrance into the king's hand was wanting. After a long and feverish delay the crown counsel determined to prove it by Sunderland, lord president, and prime minister, a recent apostate and a traitor to all sides : MACKINTOSH. the kingdom.... If, indeed, ... Again:-Mackintosh prides himself in being able to produce" the name hitherto unknown" of Robert Fowler, (then incumbent of a London parish, and afterwards Bishop of Gloucester,) who, at a private meeting of the London clergy, boldly took the lead, and decided his wavering brethren to resist James' mandate. Mr. Macaulay corrects the Christian name-Edward for Robert-and adds the name of the head was down. No MACAULAY. Meanwhile the lord president was brought in a sedan chair through the hall. Not a hat moved as he passed; and many voices cried out "Popish dog." He came into court pale and trembling, with eyes fixed on the ground, and gave his evidence in a faltering voice. He swore that the bishops had informed him of their intention to present a petition to the King, and that they had been admitted into the royal closet for that purpose.-ii. 382. Mr. Macaulay to this part of his narrative has added this reference :— See " We think he might have added, "and something more than touches from Mackintosh," who, besides introducing him to Johnstone and Citters, had already, as we see, made some extracts ready to his hand. the London parish, Cripplegate (whether from the Mackintosh papers or not we cannot tell;) but in all the numerous details of the facts he implicitly follows Mackintosh's book, without ever alluding to it; and this is the more curious, because, repeat-clamations on the acquittal of the bishops, says— Henry Lord Clarendon, in relating the public acing Mackintosh's reference to Johnstone's MS., (which of course is the common authority,) he adds that "this meeting of the clergy is mentioned in a satirical poem of the day." Surely Mackintosh, priding himself on having been the first to reveal the "fortunate virtue" of Fowler, was more entitled to a marginal mention than some anonymous libel of the day. On the first liberation of the bishops, the people, mistaking it for a final acquittal, expressed their joy : That thereupon there was a most wonderful shout, that one would have thought the hall had cracked.— Diary, vol. ii., p. 179. Mackintosh carries the metaphor a little further: he describes A shout of joy which sounded like a crack of the ancient and massy roof of Westminster. p. 275. But still it is only a metaphor. Mr. Macaulay must be more precise and particular, and, discarding the metaphor, gives as an architectural fact what would indeed deserve Lord Clarendon's epithet of 66 most wonderful"— Ten thousand persons who crowded the great hall replied [to the shout that arose in the Court itself] with a still louder shout, which made the old oaken roof to crack. Shouts and huzzas broke Loud acclamations were out in the court, and were raised. The steeples of the repeated all around at the churches sent forth joyous moment of enlargement. peals. Sprat was amazed to The bells of the Abbey hear the bells of his own church had begun to ring a abbey ringing merrily. He joyful peal when they were promptly silenced them; but stopped by Sprat amidst the his interference caused much execrations of the people. angry muttering. The bish- Can any one doubt that Mr. Macaulay was copyAs they left the court they ops found it difficult to es-ing, not the original passage, but Mackintosh, just were surrounded by thou- cape from the importunate sands who begged their bles- crowd of their well-wish-substituting old and oaken for ancient and massive? sing. The Bishop of St. ers. Lloyd [Bishop of Saint Asaph, detained in Palace Asaph's was detained in Yard by a multitude who the Palace-yard by admirers kissed his hands and gar- who struggled to touch his ments, was delivered from hands and to kiss the skirt their importunate kindness of his robe, till Clarendon, by Lord Clarendon, who, with some difficulty, rescued taking him into his carriage, him and conveyed him home found it necessary to make by a bye-path.-ii. 369. a circuit through the park to escape.-p. 264. We could fill our number with similar, and some stronger but longer, parallelisms between Sir J. Mackintosh and Mr. Macaulay; but it is not by insulated passages that we should wish the resemblance to be tested, but by the scope and topics of the entire works, and sometimes the identity of subjects not directly connected with the historical events, and which it is hardly possible to suppose to have spontaneously occurred to Mr. Macaulay. J of Churchill's troop of Horse Guards-eighty, or, See for instance Sir James' clever account of the as was added, "as many more as may be necesOrder of Jesus, a complete hors d'œuvre, having no nearer connection with the story than that father Petre happened to be a Jesuit-but of this episode we find in Mr. Macaulay an equally careful pendant, including all the same topics which Mackintosh had already elaborated. 1 We do not quote this as an instance of suspicious identity, for both copied the same authority; but to express our doubt of the anecdote itself, which is given in one of Lord Dartmouth's notes to Burnet, as told to him by Lord Bradford. We doubt because the story, incredible enough in toto, (unless the words were spoken at a different time and in some occasional allusion,) is wholly at variance with the purpose in support of which it is adduced; for on an occasion in which the king and Sunderland were anxious to increase their majority in the house of lords by calling on those who were afterwards to sit there, and thus avoiding the abuse and degradation of that high honor, it would have been an absolute contradiction to talk of overwhelming the peerage with a troop of horse guards. Of the less violent proceeding which is all that we can believe to have been really for a moment contemplated even by such a bigot as James and such a knave as Sunderland-Mackintosh slily takes occasion to remind his readers that twenty-five years afterwards another ministry did something of the same kind -meaning Queen Anne's creation of twelve tory peers in 1711. sary"-and that in point of fact the Grey and Melbourne administrations increased the house of lords by eighty-nine peerages, besides twenty promotions. When future historians come to explore the despatches of Baron Falke or Prince Lieven, as we now do those of Barillon and Citters, we suspect that Mr. Macaulay and his friends will have need of a more indulgent appreciation of political difficulties and ministerial necessities than he is willing to concede towards others. 66 Perplexing as Mr. Macaulay's conduct towards Mackintosh is on the face of these volumes, it becomes still more incomprehensible from the fact that Mr. Macaulay published in the Edinburgh Review of July, 1835, and republished in his Essays, a most laudatory review of this very History of the Revolution by Sir James Mackintosh," to which now, while making, as it seems, such ample use of it, he does not condescend to allude. We conclude that Mr. Macaulay has somehow persuaded himself that that article relieved him from the necessity of any mention of Mackintosh's History in the pages of his own great and solid literary work. But we cannot imagine how; and we shall be curious to see what explanation can be given of this, as it appears to us, extraordinary enigma. We need not endeavor to account for the hostility with which Mr. Macaulay seems to pursue several individual characters when they are tories —causa patet—but he assails with equal enmity some whigs, for his aversion to whom we can see no other motive than that they have been hitherto called illustrious, and by all former writers supposed to have done honor to their country. It seems to be the peculiarity of Mr. Macaulay's temper лgos xεVτga hazriger, to praise only where others have blamed, and to blame only where others have praised. This, we suppose, will give him the character of originality-it is certainly the only substantial originality in the work. From many examples of this original spirit we will select one-the most eminent "as a prodigy of turpitude"—one that will be at once admitted to be the most conspicuous, and therefore the fairest that we could select as a specimen Mr. Macaulay does not follow his-the great Duke of Marlborough. Him Mr. leader in this tempting sneer at the tories-he Macaulay pursues through his whole history with never before, we believe, abstained from anything like a savory sarcasm-but here he was muzzled. He could not forget that that administration which raised him to political eminence, and of which he was in return the most brilliant meteor, swamped the house of lords by creations more extravagant than Sunderland ventured to dream of, and ten times more numerous than Harley had the courage to make. We cannot forget, nor does Mr. Macaulay-and that remembrance for once silences his hatred of the tories-that the Reform Bill was forced upon the house of lords by the menace of marching into it rather more than the complement more than the ferocity and much less than the sagacity of the blood-hound. He commences this persecution even with the duke's father, who, he tells us, was— a poor cavalier baronet who haunted Whitehall and affected folio, long forgotten, in praise of monarchy made himself ridiculous by publishing a dull and and monarchs.-i. 459. This last, we admit, must be a serious offence in the nostrils of Mr. Macaulay--a friend to the monarchy ! But though he thus confidently consigns Sir Winston Churchill to every species of pers in his scrutoire, he opened one of the little drawers and took out a green purse and turned some broad pieces out of it, and after viewing them ible in his face: "Cadogan," says he, "observe for some time with a satisfaction that was very visthese pieces well; they deserve to be observed; there are just forty of them; 't is the very first sum I ever got in my life, and I have kept it unbroken to this day."-Spence, 162. But this story, supposing it to have been exactly told, retold, and written, would, as a mere proof of avarice, defeat itself, for Pope reproaches Marlborough with the care with which he used to put out his money to interest, and if Lord Cadogan had thought it a meanness he never would have repeat contempt, the learned historian shows that he ; Mr. Macaulay then proceeds to relate a singular passage, strangely exaggerated and misrepresented from one of Lord Dartmouth's notes on Burnet, in the early career of the duke, when he had no fortune but his good looks and sword;—and assumes, because the necessitous ensign purchased an annuity with 50007. given him by the Duchess of Cleveland, whose honor, such as it was, he had screened on a very critical occasion, that this probably solitary instance of extreme lavishness on one side and prudence on the other was of daily occurrence, and part and parcel of his habitual life, and that he was 66 thrifty even in his vices," and by rule and habit "a levier of contributions from ladies enriched by the spoils of more liberal lovers." Again, Marlborough was so early a miser that— Already his private drawers contained heaps of broad pieces which fifty years later remained untouched.-i. 461. The authority referred to for this statement is an anecdote told by Pope, who mortally hated Marlborough, to Spence dence. That Marlborough loved gold too well for his great glory we do not deny; but surely Mr. Macaulay might have drawn a somewhat higher inference out of this particular incident. We cannot think these "forty" coins were hoarded up from their metallic value; they were probably kept for some different reason-perhaps as precious relics and remembrances of the beginning of indepenCould not Mr. Macaulay's charitable imagination figure to itself a young man scant in fortune's goods, yet rich in inborn merit, conscious and prescient of coming greatness-could he not feel how unspeakable a blessing to such a one must have been pecuniary independence, as the best safeguard to political honesty and freedomthe surest escape from the degrading patronage of titled and official mediocrities? young Churchill no golden India opened her bountiful bosom, to which an aspirant to station and fame might retire for a while, to secure by honorable thrift an honorable independence, and thereby the power and liberty of action to realize the prospects of an honest ambition. In the times of But even if the duke had kept the pieces from the meanest motive, how would that justify Mr. Macaulay's exaggeration that already (i. e. 1670, ætat. 20) his private drawers contained heaps of broad pieces? We have entered into this matter at a length that may appear disproportionate; but wishing to give a specimen of Mr. Macaulay's style, we think we could not do better than by such a prominent example. It cannot be said that we have dwelt on petty mistakes about poor persons when we expose the art by which Mr. Macaulay, on the single defect (if it can be called one) of economy in so great a character, raises such a superstructure How much not only of the most sordid vices. more noble but more just towards the duke was Lord Bolingbroke, his personal and political enemy. "A certain parasite," says Warton, "who thought of the Duke of Marlborough was stopped short by to please Lord Bolingbroke by ridiculing the avarice that lord, who said, 'He was so very great a man that I forgot he had that vice.'" Having thus shown Mr. Macaulay's mode of dealing with what forms the chief and most char One day, as the duke was looking over some pa-acteristic feature of his book—its anecdotical gos to have spontaneously occurred to Mr. Macaulay. | of Churchill's troop of Horse Guards-eighty, or, See for instance Sir James' clever account of the as was added, "as many more as may be neces Order of Jesus, a complete hors d'œuvre, having sary"-and that in point of fact the Grey and no nearer connection with the story than that father Petre happened to be a Jesuit-but of this episode we find in Mr. Macaulay an equally careful pendant, including all the same topics which Mackintosh had already elaborated. We are tempted to add one other circumstance. Both the historians relate that Sunderland had a scheme for securing a majority in the house of lords by calling up the eldest sons of some friendly lords and conferring English titles on some Scotch and Irish peers : Melbourne administrations increased the house of lords by eighty-nine peerages, besides twenty promotions. When future historians come to explore the despatches of Baron Falke or Prince Lieven, as we now do those of Barillon and Citters, we suspect that Mr. Macaulay and his friends will have need of a more indulgent appreciation of political difficulties and ministerial necessities than he is willing to concede towards others. 66 Perplexing as Mr. Macaulay's conduct towards Mackintosh is on the face of these volumes, it becomes still more incomprehensible from the fact that Mr. Macaulay published in the Edinburgh Review of July, 1835, and republished in his Essays, a most laudatory review of this very "History of the Revolution by Sir James Mackintosh," to which now, while making, as it seems. such ample use of it, he does not condescend to allude. We conclude that Mr. Macaulay has somehow persuaded himself that that article relieved him from the necessity of any mention of Mackintosh's History in the pages of his own great and solid literary work. But we cannot imagine how; and we shall be curious to see what explanation can be given of this, as it appears to us, extraordinary enigma. We need not endeavor to account for the hostility with which Mr. Macaulay seems to pursue several individual characters when they are tories We do not quote this as an instance of suspicious identity, for both copied the same authority; but to express our doubt of the anecdote itself, which is given in one of Lord Dartmouth's notes to Burnet, as told to him by Lord Bradford. We doubt because the story, incredible enough in toto, (unless the words were spoken at a different time and in some occasional allusion,) is wholly at variance with the purpose in support of which-causa patet-but he assails with equal enmity it is adduced; for on an occasion in which the king and Sunderland were anxious to increase their majority in the house of lords by calling on those who were afterwards to sit there, and thus avoiding the abuse and degradation of that high honor, it would have been an absolute contradiction to talk of overwhelming the peerage with a troop of horse guards. Of the less violent proceeding which is all that we can believe to have been really for a moment contemplated even by such a bigot as James and such a knave as Sunderland-Mackintosh slily takes occasion to remind his readers that twenty-five years afterwards another ministry did something of the same kind -meaning Queen Anne's creation of twelve tory peers in 1711. Mr. Macaulay does not follow his leader in this tempting sneer at the tories-he never before, we believe, abstained from anything like a savory sarcasm-but here he was muzzled. He could not forget that that administration which raised him to political eminence, and of which he was in return the most brilliant meteor, swamped the house of lords by creations more extravagant than Sunderland ventured to dream of, and ten times more numerous than Harley had the courage to make. We cannot forget, nor does Mr. Macaulay-and that remembrance for once silences his hatred of the tories-that the Reform Bill was forced upon the house of lords by the menace of marching into it rather more than the complement some whigs, for his aversion to whom we can see no other motive than that they have been hitherto called illustrious, and by all former writers supposed to have done honor to their country. It seems to be the peculiarity of Mr. Macaulay's temper лgos eviga hazrger, to praise only where others have blamed, and to blame only where others have praised. This, we suppose, will give him the character of originality—it is certainly the only substantial originality in the work. From many examples of this original spirit we will select one-the most eminent “as a prodigy of turpitude”—one that will be at once admitted to be the most conspicuous, and therefore the fairest that we could select as a specimen the great Duke of Marlborough. Him Mr. Macaulay pursues through his whole history with more than the ferocity and much less than the sagacity of the blood-hound. He commences this persecution even with the duke's father, who, he tells us, was a poor cavalier baronet who haunted Whitehall and affected folio, long forgotten, in praise of monarchy made himself ridiculous by publishing a dull and and monarchs.-i. 459. This last, we admit, must be a serious offence in the nostrils of Mr. Macaulay-a friend to the monarchy! But though he thus confidently consigns Sir Winston Churchill to every species of pers in his scrutoire, he opened one of the little drawers and took out a green purse and turned some broad pieces out of it, and after viewing them ible in his face: "Cadogan," says he, "observe for some time with a satisfaction that was very visthese pieces well; they deserve to be observed; there are just forty of them; 'tis the very first sum I ever got in my life, and I have kept it unbroken to this day."-Spence, 162. contempt, the learned historian shows that he knows but little about him. He was not a baronet-a trivial mistake as to an ordinary Sir John or Sir James, but of some importance when made by an ultra-critical historian concerning so immediate an ancestor of the great houses of Marlborough and Spenser, Godolphin and Montagu. He was poor, it seems-a singular reproach, as we have been twice before obliged to observe, from the democratic pen of Mr. Macaulay. We, But this story, supposing it to have been exactly tories and aristocrats as we may be thought, should told, retold, and written, would, as a mere proof never have taken the humble beginnings of a great of avarice, defeat itself, for Pope reproaches Marlman as a topic of contemptuous reproach! but borough with the care with which he used to put even here Mr. Macaulay overruns his game, for out his money to interest, and if Lord Cadogan had if the Churchills were poor, it was from the con- thought it a meanness he never would have repeatfiscations of republican tyranny. In the "Cata-ed it. logue of Lords, Knights, and Gentlemen that That Marlborough loved gold too well for his have compounded for their Estates," printed in great glory we do not deny; but surely Mr. Mac1655, three years before Cromwell's death, we aulay might have drawn a somewhat higher infind about 2650 names of plundered royalists, of ference out of this particular incident. We cannot whom the fourth in amount of composition of the think these "forty" coins were hoarded up from untitled gentlemen of England is Mr. Churchill; their metallic value; they were probably kept for and of the whole catalogue, including lords and some different reason—perhaps as precious relics baronets, he stands the twenty-eighth, and ahead and remembrances of the beginning of indepenof the Lowthers of Lowther, the Whartons of Yorkshire, the Watsons of Rockingham, the Thynns of Longleat, and a hundred others of the most opulent families in England. As to his book, we were not surprised that Mr. Macaulay should consider as ridiculous, a work which Coxe characterizes as exactly the opposite of Mr. Macaulay's own-a political history, accurate in dates and figures, and of more research than amusement! And we have a word more to say for Churchill. Mr. Macaulay celebrates the institution in 1660 of "the Royal Society destined to be a chief agent in a long series of glorious and salutary reforms" in science. Of this respectable society this poor ridiculous baronet was one of the founders! Mr. Macaulay then proceeds to relate a singular passage, strangely exaggerated and misrepresented from one of Lord Dartmouth's notes on Burnet, in the early career of the duke, when he had no fortune but his good looks and sword;—and assumes, because the necessitous ensign purchased an annuity with 50007. given him by the Duchess of Cleveland, whose honor, such as it was, he had screened on a very critical occasion, that this probably solitary instance of extreme lavishness on one side and prudence on the other was of daily occurrence, and part and parcel of his habitual life, and that "thrifty even in his vices," and by rule and habit "a levier of contributions from ladies enriched by the spoils of more liberal lovers." he was Again, Marlborough was so early a miser thatAlready his private drawers contained heaps of broad pieces which fifty years later remained untouched.-i. 461. The authority referred to for this statement is an anecdote told by Pope, who mortally hated Marlborough, to Spence dence. Could not Mr. Macaulay's charitable imagination figure to itself a young man scant in fortune's goods, yet rich in inborn merit, conscious and prescient of coming greatness-could he not feel how unspeakable a blessing to such a one must have been pecuniary independence, as the best safeguard to political honesty and freedom— the surest escape from the degrading patronage of In the times of titled and official mediocrities? young Churchill no golden India opened her bountiful bosom, to which an aspirant to station and fame might retire for a while, to secure by honorable thrift an honorable independence, and thereby the power and liberty of action to realize the prospects of an honest ambition. But even if the duke had kept the pieces from the meanest motive, how would that justify Mr. Macaulay's exaggeration that already (i. e. 1670, ætat. 20) his private drawers contained heaps of broad pieces? We have entered into this matter at a length that may appear disproportionate; but wishing to give a specimen of Mr. Macaulay's style, we think we could not do better than by such a prominent example. It cannot be said that we have dwelt on petty mistakes about poor persons when we expose the art by which Mr. Macaulay, on the single defect (if it can be called one) of economy in so great a character, raises such a superstructure of the most sordid vices. How much not only more noble but more just towards the duke was Lord Bolingbroke, his personal and political enemy. "A certain parasite," says Warton," who thought of the Duke of Marlborough was stopped short by to please Lord Bolingbroke by ridiculing the avarice that lord, who said, 'He was so very great a man that I forgot he had that vice." " Having thus shown Mr. Macaulay's mode of dealing with what forms the chief and most charOne day, as the duke was looking over some pa-acteristic feature of his book—its anecdotical gos |