Chamber in the case of ship-money, transferred to the crown the right of taxing the people; had the Star Chamber and the High Commission continued to fine, mutilate, and imprison every man who dared to raise his voice against the government; had the press been as completely enslaved here as at Vienna or Naples; had our kings gradually drawn to themselves the whole legislative power; had six generations of Englishmen passed away without a single session of parliament; and had we then at length risen up in some moment of wild excitement against our masters, what an outbreak would that have been! With what a crash, heard and felt to the furthest ends of the world, would the whole vast fabric of society have fallen! How many thou-ands of exiles, once the most prosperous and the most refined members of this great community, would have begged their bread in continental cities, or have sheltered their heads under huts of bark in the uncleared forests of America! How often should we have seen the pavement of London piled up in barricades, the houses dinted with bullets, the gutters foaming with blood! How many times should we have rushed wildly from extreme to extreme, sought refuge from anarchy in despotism, and been again driven by despotism into anarchy! The Valley of Glencoe. Mac Ian dwelt in the mouth of a ravine situated not far from the southern shore of Lochleven, an arm of the sea which deeply indents the western coast of Scotland, and separates Argyleshire from Inverness-shire. Near his house were two or three email hamlets inhabited by his tribe. The whole population which he governed was not supposed to exceed two hundred souls. In the neighbourhood of the little cluster of villages was some copsewood and some pasture-land; but a little further up the defile, no sign of population or of fruitfu ness was to be seen. In the Gaelic tongue, Glencoe signifies the Glen of Weeping; and in truth that pass is the most dreary and melancholy of all the Scottish passes-the very Valley of the Shadow of Death. Mists and storms brood over it through the greater part of the finest summer; and even on those rare days when the sun is bright, and when there is no cloud in the sky, the impression made by the landscape is sad and awful. The path lies along a stream which issues from the most sullen and gloomy of mountainpools. Huge precipices of naked stone frown on both sides. Even in July the streaks of suow may often be discerned in the rifts near the summits. All down the sides of the crags heaps of ruin mark the headlong paths of the torrents. Mile after mile the traveller looks in vain for the smoke of one but, or for one human form wrapped in a plaid, and listens in vain for the bark of a shephera's dog, or the bleat of a lamb. Mile after mile the only sound that indica es fife is the faint cry of a bird of prey from some storm-beaten pinnacle of rock. The progress of civilisation, which has turned so many wastes into fields yellow with harvests, or gay with appleblossoms, has only made Glencoe more desolate. All the science and industry of a peaceful ege can extract nothing valuable from that wilderness; but in an age of violence and rapine, the wilderness itself was valued on account of the shelter it afforded to the plunderer and his plunder. The English Country Gentleman of 1688. A country gentleman who witnessed the Revolution was probably in the receipt of about the fourth part of the rent which his acres now yield to his posterity; he was, therefore, as compared with his posterity, a poor man, and was generally under the necessity of residing, with little interruption, on his estate. To travel on the continent, to maintain an establishment in London, or even to visit London frequently, were pleasures in which only the great proprietors could indulge. It may be confidently affirmed that of the squires whose names were in King Charles's commissions of peace and lieutenancy, not one in twenty went to town once in five years, or had ever in his life wandered so far as Paris. Many lords of manors had received an education differing little from that of their menial servants. The heir of an estate often passed his boyhood and youth at the seat of his family with no better tutors than grooms and gamekeepers, and scarce attained learning enough to sign his name to a mittimus. If he went to school and to college, he generally returned before he was twenty to the seclusion of the old hall; and there, unless his mind were very happily constituted by nature, soon forgot his academical pursuits in rural business and pleasures. His chief serious employment was the care of his property. He examined samples of grain, handled pigs, and on market-days made bargains over a tankard with drovers and hop-merchants. His chief pleasures were commonly derived from field-sports and from an unrefined sensuality. His language and pronunciation were such as we should now expect to hear only from the most ignorant clowns. His oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse, were uttered with the broadest accent of his province. It was easy to discern, from the first words which he spoke, whether he came from Somersetshire or Yorkshir. He troubled himself little about decorating his abode, and if he attempted decoration, seldom produced anything but deformity. The litter of a farmyard gathered under the windows of his bedchamber, and the cabbages and gooseberry bushes grew close to his hall door. His table was loaded with coarse plenty, and guests were cordially welcome to it; but as the habit of drinking to excess was general in the class to which he belonged, and as his fortune did not enable him to intoxicate large assemblies daily with claret or canary. strong beer was the ordinary beverage. The quantity of beer consumed in those days was indeed enormous; for beer then was to the middle and lower classes not only all that beer now is, but all that wine, tea, and ardent spirits now are; it was only at great houses, or on great occasions, that foreign drink was placed on the board. The ladies of the house, whose business it had commonly been to cook the repast, retired as soon as the dishes had been devoured, and left the gentlemen to their ale and tobacco. The coarse jollity of the afternoon was often prolonged till the revellers were laid under the table. From this description it might be supposed that the English esquire of the Seventeenth century did not materially differ from a rustic miller or ale-house keeper of our time. There are, however some important parts of his character still to be noted, which will greatly modify this estimate. Unlettered as he was and unpol ished, he was still in some important points a gentleman. He was a member of a proud and powerful aristocracy, and was distinguished by many both of the good and of the bad qualities which belong to aristocrats. His family pride was beyond that of a Talbot or a Howard. He knew the genealogies and coats-of-arms of all his neighbours, and could teli which of them had assumed suppor ers without any right, and which of them were so unfortunate as to be great-grandsons of aldermen. He was a magistrate, and as such administered gratuitously to those who dwelt around him a rude patriarchal justice, which, in spite of innumerable blunders and of occnsional acts of tyranny, was yet better than no justice at all. He was an officer of the train-bands: and his military dignity, though it might move the mirth of gallants who had served a campaign in Flanders, raised his character in his own eyes and in the eyes of his neighbors. Nor, indeed, was his soldiership justly a subject of derision. In every county there were elderly gentlemen who had seen service which was no child's play. One had been knighted by Charles I. after the battle of Edgehill; another still wore a patch over the scar which he had received at Naseby; a third had defended his old house till Fairfax had blown in the door with a petard. The presence of these old Cavaliers, with their old swords and holsters, and with their old stories about Goring and Lunsford. gave to the musters of militia an earnest and warlike aspect which would otherwise have been wanting. Even those country gentlemen who were too young to have themselves exchanged blows with the cuirassiers of the Parliament, had. from childhood, been surrounded by the traces of recent war, and fed with stories of the martial exploits of their fathers and uncles. Thus the character of the English esquire of the seventeenth century was compounded of two elements which we are not accustomed to find united. His ignorance and uncouthness, his low tastes and gross phrases, would. in our time, be considered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly plebeian. Yet he was essentially a patrician, and had. in large measure, both the virtues and the vices which flourish among men set from their birth in high places, and accustomed to authority, to observance, and to self-respect. It is not easy for a generation which is accustomed to find chivalrous sentiments only in company with liberal studies and polished manners to image to itself a man with the d portment, the vocabulary, and the arcent of a carter. yet punctilious on matters of genealogy and precedence, and yet ready to risk his life rather than see a stain cast on the honour of his house. It is only, however, by thus joining together things seldom or never found together in our own experience, that we can form a just idea of that rustic aristocracy which constituted the main strength of the armies of Charles I. and which long supported with strange fidelity the interest of his descendants. When the lord of Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gait, his accent, the manner in which he stared at the shops, stumbled into the gutters ran against the porters, and stood under the water-spouts, marked him out as an excellent su ject for the operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled him into the kennel. Hackney-coachmen splashed him from head to foot. Thieves exp.ored, with perfect security, the huge pockets of his horseman's coat, while he stood entranced by the splendour of the lord-mayor's show. Money-droppers, sore from the cart's tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared to him the most friendly gentlemen he had ever seen. Painted women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Wnatstone Park, passed themselves on him for countesses and maids of honour. If he asked his way to St. James's, his informant sent him to Mile End. If he went into a shop, he wa instantly discerned to be a purchaser of everything that nobody else would buy--of second-hand emb. oidery, copper rings, and watches that would not go. It he rambled into any fashionable coffee-house, he became a nark for the insolent derision of fops and the grave waggery of Templars. Enraged and mortified, he soon returned to his mansion; and there, in the homage of his tenants, and the conversation of his boon companions, found consolation for the vexations and humiliations he had undergone. There he once more found himself a great man; and he saw nothing above him, except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near the judge, or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the lord-lieuteuant. The Roman Catholic Church.-From the review of Ranke's History of the Popes.' There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civil sation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavinian amphitheatre. The proudest roval houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century, to the pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends. till it is lost in the twilight of fable The repub ic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Pap cy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to th farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila The number of her children is greater than in any former age Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn. countries which, a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as larg as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to shew that al other Christian sects uuited amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we se any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not desti ed to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frink had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude. take his stand on a broken arch of Loudon Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.* *This poetical figure has become almost familiar as a household word. It is not origial. as has o ten been pointed out. Horace Walpole, in a letter to Sir H. Mann, says: at last some curious native of Lima will visit London, and give a sketch of the ruins On the success of the History and other works of Lord Macauley, information will be found in the life of the historian by his nephew, Mr. Trevelyan. Within a generation of its first appearance, upwards of 140,000 copies of the History will have been printed and cold in the United Kingdom alone. It has been translated into nearly all European la guages, and been unprecedentedly popular.' In a journal kept by the historian we read, under date of March 7, 1856: Longman came, with a very pleasant announcement. He and his partners find that they are overflowing with money, and think that they cannot invest it better than by advancing to me, on the usual terms of course, part of what will be due to me in December. We agreed that they shall pay twenty thousand pounds into Williams's Bank next week. What a sum to be gained by one edition of a book! I may say, gained in one day. But that was harvest day. The work had been near seven years in hand.' The cheque is still preserved as a curiosity among the archives of Messrs. Longman's firm. The transaction,' says Macaulay, is quite unparalleled in the history of the book-trade.'* We have referred to Macaulay's wonderful memory and stores of knowledge (see ante). On this subject we may quote a passage from a journal kept by his sister, Margaret Macaulay: I said that I was surprised at the great accuracy of his information, considering how desultory his reading had been. "My accuracy of Westminster and St. Paul's.' Volnay, in his Ruins of Empires, had written: flecting that if the places before me had once exhibited this animated picture, who, said I to myself. can assure me that their present desolation will not one day be the lot of our own country? Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now. in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations -who knows but that he will sit down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep a people inurned. and their greatness changed into an empty name? See also Henry Kirke White, ante. Mrs. Barbauld had shadowed forth the same idea: • With duteous zeal their pilgrimage shall take, Shall own with humble pride the lesson just, Shelley, in the preface to Peter Bell the Thirl addressed to Moore. has a similar illustration: In the firm expectation, that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Westminster Bridge shall become the muclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream: some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales or some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells, and the Fudges, and their historians. •The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, by his nephew, Georgo Otto Trevelyan, M. P. (1987), vol. i, page 410. as to facts," he said, "I owe to a cause which many men would not confess. It is due to my love of castle-building. The past is in my mind soon constructed into a romance. With a person of my turn, the minute touches are of as great interest, and perhaps greater than the most important events.. Spending so much time as I do in solitude, my mind would have rusted by gazing vacantly at the shop windows. As it is, I am no sooner in the streets than I am in Greece, in Rome, in the midst of the French Revolution. Precision in dates, the day or hour in which a man was born or died, becomes absolutely necessary. A slight fact, a sentence, a word, are of importance in my romance. Pepys's Diary formed almost inexhaustible food for my fancy. I seem to know every inch of Whitehall. I go in at Hans Holbein's Gate, and come out through the matted gallery. The conversations which I compose between great people of the time are long, and sufficiently animated; in the style, if not with the merits, of Sir Walter Scott's. The old parts of London, which you are sometimes surprised at my knowing so well, those old gates and houses down by the river, have all played their part in my stories." He spoke, too, of the manner in which he used to wander about Paris, we ving tales of the Revolution, and he thought that he owed li command of language greatly to this habit.' His biographer, Mr. Trevelyan, notices another help to memorythe extraordinary faculty of assimilating printed matter at first sight. To the end of his life, Macaulay read books faster than other people skimmed them, and skimmed them as fast as anyone else could turn the leaves.' His vast erudition, his painstaking care as a literary workman, and his hatred of all cant, affectation, and injustice, have been depicted by his biographer. His journals and letters disclose his true nobility of soul, his affection for his sisters, his support of his parents, and his generous self-sacrificing character and independence of spirit, equally conspicuous in adversity and prosperity. HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE. The History of Civilisation,' by HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE (1822– 1862), was a portion of a great work designed by its author to extend to fourteen volumes! Four were published between 1857 and 1864. They were the result of twenty years' study-the fruit of a speculative genius of no common order, but containing many rash generalisations and doctrinaire views. The public opinion concerning them seems to have subsided into Macaulay's estimate: Buckle, a man of talent and of a great deal of reading, but paradoxical and incoherent. He is eminently an anticipator, as Bacon would have said. He wants to make a system before he has got the materials, and he has not the excuse which Aristotle had of having an eminently systematising mind.' The book reminded Macaulay of the 'Divine Legation' of Warburton (see ante)-that huge structure of pa |