bearing the name of David, might have escaped the wear and tear of time," yet that we should have had an Old Testament (if an Old Testament had in that case been possible), without the Prophets, without the Books of Solomon, without a History of the Monarchy of Judah.

It is a bitter thought, to Mr. John Stuart Mill, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine.

Mr. Lothrop Motley, in his comparative estimate of Gaul and German, is of opinion that, "had Providence permitted a fusion of the two races, it is possible, from their position, and from the geographical and historical link which they would have afforded to the dominant tribes of Europe, that a worldempire might have been the result, different in many respects from any which has ever arisen." A tolerably safe reckoning. But, he sententiously adds, "Speculations upon what might have been are idle." As Shakspeare's Antonio might be made to

mean,

-What might,

Worthy Sebastian ?—O what might ?—No more.

Or to apply in a like sense the words of another Shakspearean personage,

You speak, Lord Mowbray, now, you know not what.

Mr. Froude, in his historical essay on Mary Tudor,

says we may congratulate ourselves that her early life and education had left that unhappy queen what she was, else might Cranmer's prayer-book and Articles have perished with himself; the Church of England, like the Church of France, might have risen out of the confusion of the sixteenth century, a moderate Catholicism; and the course of all European history have been different. On another page, referring to the previous reign, he contends, that the Reformation was so rapidly discrediting itself, that if Edward had not died, and the policy of the government had remained unchanged, the same rebellions, supported by the same coalitions from abroad, which were so formidable to Elizabeth, would in all probability have broken out irresistibly against Edward, and swept away the very name of Protestant out of the country. Then, again, of the last three years of Mary's reign he affirms, that the events of those years would have inevitably precipitated a revolution if her breaking health had not enabled her subjects to expect an early remedy in natural causes. 'There is no doubt how the struggle would have ended, but while it lasted it would have been inconceivably dreadful; and instead of the long glorious peace of Elizabeth, when the population doubled their numbers, and trebled their wealth, the best blood of England would have flowed away on new fields of Towton or of Barnet, and the Protestants might only have found themselves conquerors, to bleed to death on the scene of their victory."-Nor can he refrain from charitably speculating on what Mary Tudor

might have been, if her husband had treated her even with ordinary kindness. In that case she might have been known to history by an epithet the reverse of that which brands her now. "It might have been so; and those dark blots which will now lie upon her name for ever, might either never have been, or have been washed away by repentance. There is no saying. History is not of what might have been, but of what was; which, indeed, is perhaps all that could have been."

When the Duke of Gandia, Francis Borgia, eventually General of the Jesuits, was pressed by Philip of Spain to accept the office of grand master of the royal household, he declined it in favour of the Duke of Alva; and the refusal suggests to Sir James Stephen the reflection, that had Gandia preferred the duties of his secular rank to his religious aspirations, Spain might have had a saint the less and seven provinces the more; for, with the elevation of Alva, the butcheries in the Netherlands, the disgrace of Spain, and the independence of Holland might have been averted.

M. Michelet supposes the Elector to have acquiesced in the demands of Rome, and to have given up Luther in exchange for the golden rose. In that case, the assumed sequel of the assumed hypothesis is, that Luther, burnt by Leo the Tenth, would have met with the fate of Arnold of Brescia, of Savonarola, of Giordano Bruno, and ever so many others. The Reformation, once again stifled, would have left the old system to rot away in peace-pourrir sa

pourriture paisiblement. No Protestants, from that time forth, nor Jesuits either; no Jansenius, no Bossuet, no Voltaire. Autre était la scène du monde.

The French are at the least as fond as any other people of speculating in historical might-have-beens. Notably so is Chateaubriand; in whose writings one is so frequently meeting with such conjectural queries as this: "Lewis the Sixteenth abdicating, and Lewis the Seventeenth placed on the throne, and the Duke of Orleans declared Regent,-what would have happened in that case?" A query which M. de Marcellus answered by alleging the probability of the result, in that case, being identical with the course of events in 1830. Change the names and the date: Charles the Tenth abdicating, Henry the Fifth called to the throne, and the Duke of Orleans declared Regent, saved nothing, he says.

No one, in studying the closing years of Lewis the Fourteenth, M. Sainte-Beuve remarks, can come across the singular figure-originale, singulière, et assez difficile of Fénélon's pupil, the Duke of Burgundy, without putting to oneself the question, What sort of difference would it have made in history, and what sort of turn would things have taken in France, had this particular and quite peculiar Dauphin lived? -Oh, the illimitable potentialities of the potential mood!

Had doting Priam checked his son's desire,

Troy had been bright with fame, and not with fire.

Plenipotent in Ifs, in a serried series of si, si, is a

passage in M. de Lamartine's History of the Girondins, where he says that if the king had been firm and sagacious, if the clergy had been free from a longing for things temporal, and if the aristocracy had been good; if the people had been moderate, if Mirabeau had been honest, if La Fayette had been decided, if Robespierre had been humane; if, in short, all this, and that, and the other,—well, what then? Why, then "the Revolution would have progressed, majestic and calm as a heavenly thought, through France, and thence through Europe; it would have been installed like a philosophy in facts, in laws, and in creeds." What a deal may depend upon an If, one little If,—how much more upon a concatenation of them which makes Mirabeau incorrupt, and La Fayette resolute, and Robespierre a rose-water philanthropist, and Lewis the Sixteenth equally long-headed and firm-hearted, and his people a pattern of all that is temperate, disciplined, and self-restrained!

The fact that Rousseau commenced his literary career par le petit journal,-that together with Diderot he published the Persifleur, and that the Persifleur never reached a second number,-leads M. Arsène Houssaye to imagine what might have happened, to Jean-Jacques, and to France, and to the world, if that journal had been successful, and if Jean-Jacques and Denis had made their fortune by it, and so been in capital spirits with themselves and society at large. In that case, there is no such thing as the Encyclopédie. Diderot has no occasion to en