gious, and social-as he displayed and uttered upon his first appearance. Eager to meet him, the critics fly to arms, and the literary world has seldom seen such a motley array as they present. Side by side are Whig and Tory; shoulder to shoulder stand High-Churchmen and Low; Quaker and Roman Catholic are alike putting on their harness to make common cause against the common calumniator. James, the victim, at once, of misfortune and crime, is, if possible, to be vindicated; William of Orange is to be robbed of some of the glory with which the fulsome adulation of the historian has invested him; and our own Penn is to be proven what we have always been taught to regard him-the very opposite of Mr. Macaulay's William Penn-a great and good man, possessing fewer frailties and more virtues than fall to the lot of common humanity. But while these volumes have given food to the critics, they have supplied a historic want of no ordinary degree. They range over the stormy and trying period between the Revolution of 1688 and the consummation of the Peace of Ryswick, detailing with a surprising minuteness all the incidents of the campaign in Ireland, which resulted in the overthrow and defeat of James; describing with most pictorial effect the French successes in Flanders, the power and glory of Louis XIV., the imbecility of the allies in three campaigns, giving every cir cumstance of the rebellions in Scotland, with a masterly illustration of the state of the Highlands at that period; and yet neglecting in no degree the court, the legislation, the treasons, the convocation, the personages, which made up the great drama of the history of which, in dramatic phrase, the scene was London, and the time, the ebb of the great revolutionary current. The second volume closed with the height of the flood, the third opens with the beginning of the ominous ebb, which was to leave many a cherished plan, like ships on shore, far beyond the reach of sustaining waves and favoring breezes.

Before proceeding to the consideration of Mr. Macaulay's volumes, let us indulge our republican fancy with a short survey of English monarchy as a claimant to legitimacy in government. As well as it has worked practically, with the moderation and sound judgment of the English people to sup

port it, it is in the abstract the most absurd of systems. In theory ignoring the popular element, in practice, fearing it, and making concessions to it; in theory, claiming that the king is supreme ruler even of the parliamentary estates, and in practice, limiting his power by parliamentary rights, stronger, and more deeply rooted than the throne itself. Their kings seem to possess a certain duality of person and character, not very easily defined, and which, like the horns of a dilemma will appear sometimes very perplexing in our efforts to solve certain problems into which they enter as variable quantities. When they are kings-when they are endued with that indefeasible right, "the divinity which doth hedge a king," they are not men; they are the ridiculous puppets of a system as absurd in theory as the worship of the Grand Lama. "The king can do no wrong;" the king's person is holy; the king's touch has a power like the healing garment of our blessed Lord-such are the cries when they are kings. But when in some wild tempest of popular delirium, the nation forgets his kingship, and hunts him down like a robber; when the bright glare of truth melts away the frost-work adornments of sophistry which a loyal people have placed around their puppet monarch; then, ah! then, he is a man like the meanest of his subjects; they care not in their wrath, that the shrine will be left without its oracle, the arcana without its interpreting priest: divine right and legitimate prescription lie, like the Quaker's coat, by the road-side, not to be put on until the battle for popular liberties has been fought and won, and until habit-loyal habit-craves a little more oppression at the monarch's hands. There are numerous instances in English history to illustrate this tidal wave theory of popular progress and royal philosophy. If, as has been philosophically asserted, civilization consists in two facts-the progress of society, and the development of the individual man,* can there be (we speak abstractly) a more pernicious system than legitimate monarchy, a system which recognizes neither? Can there be, has there ever been, a perfect bona fides between such a monarch and a progressive people? As this question is of great importance in the problems of

* Guizot's History of Civilization.

history before us, let us look at it in the light of facts. To go no farther back than the time of Elizabeth, we find that, under color of a Roman Catholic outbreak in the Northern counties, Elizabeth, amid the acclamations of the English people, beheaded Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth reigned sixteen years afterwards; but when, at length, unprepared for the summons of the grim king, she died on her cushions, it was the son of her murdered cousin who ascended her throne. Had he been a greater pedant, a more arrant coward, a more obstinate and oppressive monarch than he was, what right had they to complain? He did not love them; he bore them a vindictive grudge which no time could efface, and no submission destroy.

When Charles the First stood before the committee appointed to try him, he flung the truth, the historic truth, into the teeth of Bradshaw. He was their monarch of an uninterrupted succession of a thousand years; it was absurd to try him. Talk about violating the civil compact! There was no compact between them; they were his property; every written line of the Constitution, and every traditionary custom, nay even the freest provisions of Magna Charta were instinct with the doctrine of legitimate sovereignty, and the power and unction of majesty! But the rebellion succeeded; the poor king, in spite of his excellent logic, lost his head; and his son, Charles, after the battle of Worcester, and after dangers and concealments more trying than the stormiest battle, was driven, in the hey-day of youth, an exile upon the Continent. He lost his nationality, and was recast in a French mould. The language and literature, the social excesses, the entire absence of purity and principle which marked the minority reign of Louis XIV., were the school of a king about to be restored to the unsatisfied realm of England-unsatisfied, for it had rushed from one extreme to the other, and they were equally pernicious. He came back amid the unanimous shouts of a nation; and what did the English people expect? A monarch rendered serious and judicious for a life-time by his father's fate, schooled by exile and adversity to moderation; the hero of a reign which should be written in letters of gold on the pages of English history. All hearts, all hopes hung fondly upon the Restoration.

What should they have expected? What would a sagacious

observation of human nature teach us to expect? What would be the promptings of unsanctified revenge? They had killed his father, corrupted his blood, set a price upon his head; had beheaded, hung, drowned, and tortured those who were honest in their attachment to his person; had driven him away into exile as the pensioner of France; and then, acting as unwisely in their clemency as they had in their cruelty, had brought him back to a power which was, if he chose to make it so, unlimited despotism.

What they should have expected occurred. He deceived the parliament and the people; he prostituted female virtue and public morals; he sold the nation's territory and the nation's honor to France, the friend of his poverty and exile; his mistresses and favorites ate up the people's substance, and he himself, pretending to be a member and upholder of the Church of England, was at heart, in life as in death, a Roman Catholic.

As false, as profligate and as treacherous as was the conduct of Charles II., it is, we submit, a valid conclusion from known premises; it is what the English nation should have expected from him.

The reign of James II. was but the expected and ardently desired close of the dynasty of the restored Stuarts; the filling up of the measure of their iniquity. He had all the elements of enmity to the English which Charles had, and he had also the host of evils which the reign of Charles had produced and fostered. Venality, political corruption, injustice in courts at law, profligacy in the chambers of the palace, all called out for vengeance; he oppressed the people and trampled their religion and political rights with a rudeness and discourtesy unlike his brother's conduct. Charles had been an exquisite and good-humored villain, whose purpose was acted out without being asserted; his secret object was to accomplish absolute monarchy and restore Popery, but he had the cunning and nonchalance which conceals the design and is not irritated at obstacles in carrying it out. James, having the same end in view, was obstinate, ill-humored, and loquacious; there was no cloak to the enormity of his principles and his designs, and so the struggle was short. "It has often been asked," says

Guizot, "what course affairs would have taken if William III. had not existed and come over to put an end to the quarrel between James and the people. My firm belief is, that the same event would have taken place. All England, except a very small party, was at this time arrayed against James, and it seems very certain that under some form or other the revolution of 1688 must have been accomplished."* Without speculating upon what might have happened under other circumstances, one glance at the history proves to us that William of Orange was in a peculiar manner the providential deliverer of the English people, the man for the crisis, of whom it may almost be said, that had he not lived, another, formed by European events and by the hand of proyidence for this very purpose, must have arisen, almost identical with him.

And with these remarks by way of necessary preface, let us approach the new volumes of Mr. Macaulay, which open with the accomplishment of the Revolution and the accession of William and Mary.

With ceremonies as gorgeous as those which had marked the accession of many generations of the Lord's Anointed, these Semi-Anointed ones were proclaimed by Garter-king-atArms from the Strand to Temple-bar. The great English heart, bruised and shaken by nearly a century of oppressive mis-government, throbbed wildly at the prospect of a peaceful and happy reign: they named the new king "William the Deliverer;" every one was pleased, because all parties looked for perfect satisfaction and redress at his hands. The storm which had blown away James and the Stuart dynasty, had howled itself to rest for a season beyond the English Channel and the Irish Sea. Tories and Whigs, High-Churchmen and Low, all men and all parties, except a few sincere or plotting Jacobites, waited in happy expectancy the first proceedings of a monarch who was to be in a literal sense "all things to all men"-to redress all wrongs-punish capitally according to the will of one party, give universal indemnity at the clamor of the other-remove from children's heads the sins of the fathers-uphold the surplices and genuflections of Westminster

* History of Civilization, Lect. on the English Revolution.