Historical would-have-beens, or might-have-beens, are of frequent occurrence among the ruminations of Sir Archibald Alison. Had America not been totally wanting in nomad tribes-to take one instance the empires of New Granada and Peru, he says, would have been repeatedly overturned, like those of the Assyrians and Medes, by the arms of the shepherd kings. The energy of the desert, he affirms, would have been engrafted on the riches of civilisation; the feeble and debasing government of a false theocracy would have been supplanted by the energetic spirit of roving independence: and when the Spaniards appeared on their coasts, instead of a meek race, who tendered their necks to the yoke and their riches to the spoiler, the invaders would have encountered the lances of freemen, who would have equalled them in valour, and have speedily hurled them back into the waves.

Treating, again, of our wars with America and France, Sir Archibald decides that if Great Britain had put her naval and military forces on a proper footing during peace, and been ready, on the first breaking out of hostilities, to act with an energy worthy of her real strength: if she had possessed 50,000 disposable troops in 1775, and 100,000 in 1792, the American War might have been brought to a victorious termination in 1776, the French contest in 1793: "Six years of subsequent disastrous warfare in the first case, and twenty of glorious but costly hostilities in the second, would have been avoided; and the national debt, instead of eight hundred,

would now have been under two hundred millions sterling."

Another tense of Sir Archibald's subjunctive mood. Had the report of the Bullion Committee in 1811 been acted upon, and the resumption of cash payments been made compulsory, what would have been the result? Evident ruin to the Bank, according to Alison; bankruptcy to the government, and an abandonment of all the enterprises, vital to the state, in which the empire was engaged. Wellington, deprived of all his pecuniary resources in Spain, would, the historian is clear, have been compelled to withdraw from the Peninsula: in the mortal struggle between domestic insolvency and disaster abroad, all our foreign efforts must have been abandoned. "The crash in England would have come precisely at the crisis of the war; cash payments would have been resumed in May, 1813, just after the battle of Lutzen, and on the eve of the armistice of Prague; Napoleon, relieved from the pressure of Wellington's veterans, would have made head against the forces of the north;" while, as regards the forces of the north themselves and the allies at large, Austria, in such unpromising circumstances, would never have joined the coalition; Russia, exhausted and discouraged, would have retired to her forests; Germany, unsupported by British subsidies, would have remained dormant in the strife; and "the sun of European freedom would have sunk beneath the wave of Gallic ambition."

Elsewhere Sir Archibald pronounces it to be

"perhaps not going too far" to assert, that had a paper currency been found out, and brought into general use, at an earlier period, it "might have averted the fall of the Roman Empire." Almost equally characteristic of the learned author, not without a soupçon of Mr. Buckle infused, is the hypothetical query or challenge: "Had the Russians been located in Yorkshire, and the Anglo-Saxon on the banks of the Volga,-who will affirm that the character of the two nations, despite the all but indelible influence of race, would not have been exchanged?" But what, after all, avails this sort of query, or challenge? For, to apply certain lines of Mr. Tennyson's,

while we breathe beneath the sun, The world which credits what is done

Is cold to all that MIGHT HAVE BEEN.

Mr. Carlyle, although in at least one place he treats the speculation of historical would-have-beens as a vanity, indulges now and then in its conjectural hypotheses. The subjunctive, the optative mood, he once remarked, are vague moods: there is no tense one can found on but the preterite of the indicative. But when he is in the mood, the contingencies of the subjunctive are not without interest to him. As where he speculates on the difference it might have made to France, and through France to the world at large, had Mirabeau been differently brought up. Had the young Mirabeau had a father as other men have; or even no father at all! Consider him, in

that case, rising by natural gradation, by the rank, the opportunity, the irrepressible buoyant faculties he had, step after step, to official place-to the chief official place; as, in a time when Turgots, Neckers, and men of ability, were grown indispensable, Mr. Carlyle considers him sure to have done. "There would then have been at the summit of France the one French Man who could have grappled with that great Question; who, yielding and refusing, managing, guiding, and, in short, seeing and daring what was to be done, had perhaps saved France her Revolution; remaking her by peaceabler methods! But to the Supreme Powers it seemed not so." Or again, as where he conjectures the effect of a bolder and defiant demeanour of Lewis the Sixteenth when detained at Varennes, on the occasion of the Royal Family's attempted flight in June, 1791. What if the King had dared the Drouet set to detain him— had told them that he would not be taken alivehad called on the body-guards to support him, and on the postilions to start again at once? The historian fancies in that case the pale paralysis of those two Le Blanc musketeers; the drooping of Drouet's under-jaw; and Lewis faring on; in some few steps awakening relays and hussars; triumphant entry into Montmédi; and the whole course of French History different. And later in the narrative he asks, why were not Drouet and Procureur Sausse in their beds, that unblessed Varennes night? Why did they not let the Korff Berline go whither it listed? "Nameless incoherency, incompatibility,

perhaps prodigies at which the world still shudders, had been spared." Or again, as where, in his latest and most elaborate history, Mr. Carlyle refers to the rumour circulated in Germany in 1730, that the Prince-Royal of Prussia was to have one of the Imperial Archduchesses, perhaps Maria Theresa herself. "Which might indeed have saved immensities of trouble to the whole world as well as to the Pair in question, and have made a very different History for Germany and the rest of us. Fancy it!"

Fancy it, he bids us. Nevertheless had he, long years before, exposed the futility of such fancies; warning us that "these same would-have-beens [the italics his own] are mostly a vanity;" and that “ the World's History could never in the least be what it would, or might, or should, by any manner of potentiality, but simply and altogether what it is." In which summary sentence Mr. Carlyle sufficiently disposes, to all practical purposes, of historical might, could, would, or should-have-beens.

As Wallenstein says, in the tragic sequel of Schiller's triology,

-Might or might not

Is now an idle question.

Or, to apply a remark of Professor Moir's, in a case of purely conjectural criticism, "In such calculations of probability, we can only use Sebastian's words"What had been is unknown; what is, appears.'" Or again, the style of Mr. Browning's subtly suggestive apologist: