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on, and begin to rub our eyes. For instance, here is the | jolly, old, fat coachmen ever talked as Old Weller talks and outline of a man's character:

"He (Mr. Klem) never goes down the middle of a passage like another Christian, but shuffles against the wall, as if entreating me to take notice that he is occupying as little space as possible in his own house."

No one ever sees him going out or in, but he always "turns up with a flat pint of beer at half-past nine;" his daughter, a Miss Klem, "apparently ten years older than her parents," is described as having a "bed and smells of it, and carries it about the earth at dusk and hides it in deserted houses." The whole family possess the "power of converting everything into flue." This is funny, clever, vulgar, and graphic enough; but it is caricature and caricature alone. It makes us laugh only to read; it would make us laugh still more on the stage of the "Olympic," with Robson to take the part of Miss Klem; but it would not be one inch nearer life, and we should be convinced that no such human beings ever existed out of that magic scene where Mr. Dickens has placed them.

If we turn from such minor characters as these to our author's master-pieces, such as Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick, or Macawber, we are still pursued by the same fatal deficiency. It is impossible to be wittier than Sam, more singular or more amusing than his master, or in a more ludicrous state of shipwreck than Macawber; but take them away from the scenes of the farce in which they appear, and they are veritable dummies. Inside the magic circle they act, and live, and move, and talk; outside they are as dead as one of the fantoccini. One of the most striking of modern writers, indeed, tells us that truth underlies Dickens' exaggeration, and that " allowing for his manner of telling the story he is always true to life; if he argues in a circle of stage-fire, he is not, therefore, to lose his wit." By all means let him have his reputation for wit and humour untouched, but exaggerated sketches of life are false sketches, and no available truth can underlie falsehood. The picture may amuse us, but as a work of art it fails. Far deeper is the failure, in a higher point of view, as an engine for moral teaching. A true picture of life, with its due proportion of light and shade, its virtue and villany, the wheat and tares growing together until the harvest, the splendour and the beauty, the ugliness and squalor, the sin and suffering, the righteousness and the peace, the joy and the misery,-all fairly drawn, have always a sound and healthy message. The more perfect and truthful the art with which it is painted, the higher the morality; the nearer its teaching to that which He who rules the world means that world to teach. Mr. Dickens tacitly ignores this truth by looking only at certain aspects of life, and throwing a veil of exaggeration over nearly the whole of them. He has a boundless range of fancy, and an overflowing store of witty and humorous images always at command. Wit and fancy both run riot; and the result is the strangest mixture of truth and error that can be imagined. Mr. Pickwick is like no human being under the sun; he does things, and does them in a way which no sane person ever yet dreamed of doing. In the story, and under Mr. Dickens' guidance, all seems natural enough; but outside it, it is hopelessly absurd. In the story we expect Mr. Pickwick to get drunk, and be wheeled into the pound; to moralize as he there does; to be wheeled away again and to feel no disgrace; to introduce a couple of swindling adventurers without fear into the house of his best friends; to talk, as only he could talk, to the cabman about his horse's age and habits; to refuse to pay the costs in Bardell v. Pickwick, and to perpetrate the absurdities he does perpetrate. Such is the skill and power, the freshness and dexterity of the painter, that we see just what he sees, and as he wishes us to see it. But one glance off the page on to the crowded mystery of the world about us, and the illusion is destroyed. Sam Weller, in his way, is quite as inimitable. He has more fun and wit in him than all the menservants in Babylon put together ever had or ever will have; the very thought of his humorous dialogue makes us smile in the very driest and dreariest of half-hours, But that such a phoenix ever existed; that

writes to his son, is an idea that never occurs to us.

The same truth applies, with more or less force, to all the stories, or sketches, and characters before us. Up to a certain point they are often true and admirably drawn; beyond that, they pass into the domain of farce or pantomime. The wonder is that our author having attempted so infinite a variety of character, especially among the middle and lower classes of life, has not made his pictures more disagreeable than they are; and in this, indeed, he gives us but another proof of his exceeding skill. He has a host of imitators, of course; but in their hands the mere trick of exaggeration, and a liberal use of Boz's pallette, simply make them ludicrous and offensive,-a fate which the least touch of genius always escapes.

As a proof that Dickens deals with very little more than the mere surface of things, we have but to recall the one fact that we remember almost all his chief or most amusing characters by some intensely humorous or grotesque description. Mr. Carker is little more than two rows of shining teeth; the Dwarf drinks boiling rum out of a pipkin; our most worthy friend Captain Cuttle is little more than “ than "a hook," "the instrument," that says "stand by," "aye, aye, my lad," or, "when found make a note of it;" the Raven in Barnaby Rudge is far more like a human being than many a man in that story; Toots and Mr. Dick are merely dreamy shadows of the same mild lunatic that has no part or business in any story, and plays none in life; while Mark Tapley, and a dozen other such nonentities, simply inform us that "it's jolly." All these and scores of other grotesque absurdities stand out brightly and clearly before us, by the sheer skill of the author, the keenness of his vision, and his command of words; as indeed do all the kettles, the clocks, the houses, and the umbrellas, that talk by the hour together. But it is not so in real life. Two rows of shining teeth, there, are no guide to a man's character. We gain nothing by being told that Mr. Rinks "was a thin man behind a shirt-collar;" that his friend whistles "an overture on the triangle;" or, that Mr. Jeffs "resided between two long ears." Oliver Cromwell had a wart on his nose, Mr. Klem carried a "flat pint of beer" (whatever that may be), Nelson had but one arm, Diogenes squinted in one eye, Wilberforce had a mole on his left leg; but neither the republican, the lodginghouse-keeper, the admiral, the philosopher, nor the philanthropist is to be known by any one of these peculiarities. Their greatness, if they had any, lay elsewhere. Why then should Todgers be known by his shirt-sleeves, Major Gunstock by his mutton-chop whiskers, Carker by his teeth, or Mr. Dawdle by a lisp? Why should a man, if he have a heart, be drawn in a gush of maudlin sentiment, or if he have not, by a dash of caricature? Any given grocer is not simply an entity that sands his sugar, but a living man; with feelings, passions, emotions, as strong and as real as the pet workman or the pet young lady who goes into hysterics over the real or imaginary evils of life at the crisis of the story. Life is not made up of an infinite series of small jokes, little patches of fun, or of impossible contradictions. Talk to be amusing need not necessarily be slang. It is an ill service which Mr. Dickens has done to make our boys and girls, our young gentlemen and our young ladies, think that they cannot be lively without talking slang. The world is still the world in which men are acting, speaking, and suffering for another and truer life, either for good, or for evil;-and the picture which wholly omits this view of the subject is radically false and untrue.

that

How partial and imperfect is Mr. Dickens' knowledge of men and women, or in some points how deadened his power of perception by continual thirst after the ludicrous, is apparent from the one fact that his highest idea of a gentleman is Sir Leicester Dedlock in Bleak House, or Cousin Feenix or Lord Verisopht: it is not too much to say he has never grasped the notion of what an English gentleman or an English lady is. But he has devoted himself, with a pertinacity unlike the general kindliness of his character, to make English gentlemen and English ladies hateful, or ludicrous, or contemptible, and, as a class, in

ferior to every other class. Again, every picture he attempts to draw of love, or love-making, is simply and absolutely ludicrous. Of these, and all his other deficiencies, as well as of his endless vivacity, his skilful wit, his keen perception, his broad caricature, his faithful accuracy, his unwearied goodnature and power of amusing the reader, we might, if space permitted, give abundant and amusing examples. But he is too well known to need advertisement; and too widely admired to need praise. Ours has been an invidious task; that of trying to show why a master of English fiction has not done greater and better things. He has failed mainly because he has been carried away by the passion and tide of the moment, by his love of what is quaint, grotesque, sensational, and humorous; by forgetting that which is broadly human, and appliesto every age, in what is local, temporal, and evanescent. To be able to describe all the knockers down one side of a street, and up the other, is a wondrous gift; to be able to describe one human heart, with all its strange mixture of good and evil, its laughter and tears, its shade and sunshine, is infinitely greater. The world is not made up of funny streets, grotesque men, mysterious knockers, paralytic houses, or semi-lunatics. It is useless for Mr. Dickens to preach that it is. Mrs. Partington was excellent at her broom; but the Atlantic was too much for her. It will be too much for any one who sets out to view life only on its humorous side. From this vice our author's earliest book is comparatively free. This is his volume of Sketches, written about the year 1836. Their main force is spent on streets, and things external; but they are full of vigour, and of kindly feeling, and will be famous when some of his later and more "spasmodic" books are forgotten. It is too late, now, to hope that he will give us a story with a real plot in it, or in which the characters will do more than walk in, say their say, and retire. But, it is not too late to hope that he will give his brain time to rest and to meditate a while; that he will with iron hand tear away some of the extravagances of his style, and the eccentricities of his observation, leave off spectacles, and stick more closely to human nature in its plainest, simplest, elements. The many admirable sketches he has drawn, the humour and the beauty of many single groups, his power of observation, his freedom from bitterness, and his love of sunshine, will, we hope, yet culminate in a more profound and truthful picture of human life than he has yet given us. For this we wait.

Perry's Church History.*

NY work that helps to show us how the English Church struggled through the Great Rebellion must always command respect. Not that volumes professing to be histories of that stormy period are by any means scarce, but they are too often the work of partizans, more eager to uphold a favourite theory than to proclaim the truth. This reproach, however, does not belong to Mr. Perry's History of the Church of England. Defective as it certainly is in some points, it is, nevertheless, an impartial exponent of the theology and temper of the times which it chronicles. Its author may fairly say with Shakespeare:

"While others fish with craft for great opinion, I with great Truth catch mere simplicity; Whilst some with cunning gild their copper crowns, With truth and plainness I do wear mine bare." Mr. Perry sets about his task in a spirit of thorough impartiality, and this alone would give a charm to his book. So free is it from party bias that it would be hard to say whether High Church or Low Church might most justly claim the author. This may sound like doubtful praise; but it is not every one who can hold the scales so

The History of the Church of England, from the Death of Elizabeth to the Present Time. By the Rev. George G. Perry, M.A. Vol. II. Saunders, Otley, and Co. London, 1862.

evenly as that a spectator, gifted with only the ordinary share of common sense, can tell when the beam begins to descend on either side. Most compilers of history think it only fair trading to throw in a good-sized lump of home manufacture to increase the weight of their saleable commodities; but Mr. Perry knows nothing of such huckstering. He gives fair weight for the money, and if the purchaser does not like a good wholesome article, he can easily find places where a sickly counterfeit is sold.

The present volume, then, is what it represents itself to be-a history, and that is no light praise. Lord Macaulay has given us a specimen of literary sleight-of-hand. It is marvellous how a little skilful manipulation can conjure away awkward facts, and transport historical truth into the region of romance. He has proved himself the very Wiljalba Frikell of authors. And, of course, he will always have his humble imitators. The lion is scarcely dead but a score of asses are quarrelling over his skin. Any writer, therefore, who can be induced to content himself with something like an honest statement of facts, and the deductions which may fairly be drawn from them, if he does not come up to the popular notion of a historian, will at least command the respect of every thoughtful man.

This honesty of purpose, however, which distinguishes Mr. Perry, makes a certain amount of dryness inevitable. When an author writes a series of short novels, which he strings together, and, for want of a better name, calls them history, he must be but a dull fellow if he cannot make his book amusing. With the spice-box in his hands, the dish may be flavoured to suit any palate. But if he feels bound to place a limit to his fancy, and make his narrative bear some sort of resemblance to what actually did take place, a certain heaviness ensues, the reader begins to yawn, and the book is voted a bore. And the reason is obvious. No life, whether public or private, is a continued course of brilliant effects. We must be prepared to find the dull monotony of every-day business side by side with stirring incident, and any author who picks out the one, and leaves the other, may be very well qualified to write a "sensation" drama, but he had better let history alone.

But while Mr. Perry scorns to sacrifice truth in order to make his book amusing, he does not always turn his materials to the best account. In some of his portraits there is a feebleness of expression and want of tone, while in none of them is there that finish that marks the careful and laborious artist. And this is the less excusable when we remember what a gallery of worthies might have been collected from the Restoration age. Juxon, Sanderson, Cosin, Sancroft, Hammond, Jeremy Taylor, South, and Thorndike are names which have passed into household words. All of us would prize a life-like portrait of any one of them. But here Mr. Perry altogether fails. The greatest characters in his hands become commonplace. His way of treating them, however, shows enough of artistic skill to make us wish that he had spared more Few can ever hope to become historical portrait-painters time and space to this important portion of his subject. on a grand scale; but any one who has Mr. Perry's ability may with care and study produce likenesses much more worthy of the originals.

The second instalment of the History of the Church of England commences with the opening of the Long Parliament in 1640, and brings us at once to the most unhappy days of Charles I. If the past is a mirror of the future, attempts in our days to Puritanise the Church may well give a melancholy interest to this dreadful page of history. There are not a few things among us which have their precedent in days when ministers were ejected from their livings and sent forth to beg their bread for no higher offence than railing off their communion table or bowing at the Holy Name. The root-and-branch work, inaugurated by the Presbyterians and completed by the Independents, is well described by Mr. Perry, and the account which he gives of the state of England under the Directory is as awful as it is true.

But there are special and urgent reasons at the present time for studying this Reign of Terror. Some Nonconformists are collecting all their energies to celebrate the memory of their "Confessors" of 1662. Whatever may be the merits or demerits of the Act of Uniformity, let people stop to inquire a little into the facts of the case. On the one hand it is simply foolish to affirm that the preachers ejected in 1662 were the type of modern Dissenters. No affirmation is more groundless. On the other hand it is hard to realize-God grant we may never know by experience what the state of England must have been when bishops were hiding and priests were forbidden to teach in churches or in schools; when the Prayer-book was banished as an abomination and when such men as Sanderson, Taylor, and Bull avoided proscription only by putting their books out of sight and repeating the Offices from memory. And yet when better times returned the usurping ministers were not thrust out of the livings into which they had been so unjustly intruded. No violence was done to their persons or goods. They were called upon to subscribe the Act of Uniformity; to express in this way their conformity to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England; and, failing such subscription, their benefices were declared to be vacant. Never in the history of the world were men treated with larger forbearance.

Upon the whole Mr. Perry's work contains much valuable information on the character of the great Puritan outbreak at the Rebellion. But while we bear a ready testimony to the accuracy of his facts, we must at the same time say that there are statements in which we cannot concur. We have no desire, however, to press these points, in the face of so much that is good. The book deserves to be widely read; and when it is supplemented by an index, it will be a necessary addition to every stu

dent's shelf.

Life of Lord Bacon.*

MONG the nun.erous disservices rendered to literature by Lord Macaulay not the least must be accounted the rhetorical and superficial style in which he has handled the reputation, personal and philosophical, of Francis Bacon. The prevailing notion of Lord Bacon's character, among the ordinary portion of the reading public of England, would be found to be probably no more than an echo of Macaulay's famous essay. The brilliant recklessness with which the writer interprets every fact in the great philosopher's history, so as to confirm his own foregone conclusion, the forcible invective with which his name is vilified, and, above all, the assumption of an overwhelming knowledge of the subject which the essayist was very far from really possessing, have combined to hurry his readers into a hostile opinion which it will be long ere the labours of more patient, but less dashing scholars will be able to shake or modify. And moreover Bacon, having had the misfortune to be Lord High Chancellor of England, suffered the consequent mishap of having his life written by an author less brilliant and more superficial than Macaulay, but who, like Macaulay, wrote for the many and has had a large audience. The late Lord Campbell's biography of his most illustrious predecessor on the woolsack confirms the slanders of Macaulay, and spreads yet wider a shallow estimate of Bacon's character and life. But the mischief does not end here. The ungenerous accusations called forth an advocate and defender whose pleading has proved more damaging than the accusations themselves, and we can scarcely doubt that Mr. W. Hepworth Dixon's superficial reply leaves a much more unsatisfactory impression of Bacon's life than the superficial attacks of Campbell and Macaulay. Happily, we now possess an opportunity

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of judging from authentic sources what Bacon's life really was, distorted neither by the ungenerous bitterness of rhetorical assailants, nor the well-meant feebleness of an incompetent defender. We wish very briefly to point out the present aspect of the controversy, and to show what is being done in vindication, partially at least, of the fair fame of one of the wisest and most illustrious of mankind.

We may begin by noticing in a few words the drift and purport of Mr. Dixon's volume. Starting from a psychological principle, which must appear ludicrously untenable to everybody but Mr. Dixon himself, who may claim whatever merit belongs to its discovery, that "Nature abhors antitheses, and if she may make a god or devil, she will not put the two in one," he asserts that "Nature never yet made such a man as Macaulay paints." Mr. Dixon's meaning in this proposition is that wisdom of intellect and meanness or vice of character are never found in combination-as shallow and palpably absurd a doctrine as was ever propounded. Why, nearly every man we meet is more or less of an antithesis and a contradiction. We can scarcely call to mind a single illustrious name which does not suggest antithesis of character more or less violent. Take Goëthe, Burns, Cicero-all instances of this combination of intellectual power with moral weakness. Mr. Dixon, in borrowing the form of an ancient and exploded axiom in physics, has produced an axiom equally untrue in ethics, and which is only not exploded because it has never before been advanced. Having taken this as a kind of basis for his theory, he asks us to judge Bacon's life in its entirety; life in its entirety; "small facts may be true, broad facts must be true." If Mr. Dixon had spent his time in laborious research, such as Mr. Spedding has pursued, instead of wasting it in the concoction of these false or meaningless aphorisms, he would have rendered a much greater service to the cause of which he was the voluntary advocate. His argumentation is based upon these à priori grounds, when it should have been supported by absolute facts. He has attempted fine writing where we wanted hard reading; and where we looked for facts and documents we are regaled with much foolish talk about Nature's "forks never flashing from a blue vault," and her waves not ceasing "to crest when the wind which whipped them lulls." We must do Mr. Dixon the credit to admit that he has placed the general argument for Bacon's integrity of character in a strong light. As he says, "in front of all detail a general question must be put," namely, "how came it that whilst men of undoubtedly inferior power to Bacon secured important and lucrative offices in the State, he who was more learned, more thoughtful, and more eloquent than any or all of these, was left behind in the race for promotion? How came it that Coke became Attorney-general at the age of forty-two, while Bacon, on obtaining the same office, was ten years older? Burnley was Lord Chancellor at forty-seven; Bacon was fifty-seven when he was appointed to the seals. Again, Bacon was not only later in getting preferment than men. of inferior merit, but he made less use of its opportunities when within his reach." But this argument, however well put, must not be taken for more than it is worth. That Bacon was unsuccessful is no proof that he did not deserve to be so; he would not be the only man who has discovered that meanness and servility are frequently less sure means of procuring advancement and gaining their own end than a stern integrity. The chief force in this argument is as a preliminary to an investigation of facts, and as tending to mitigate any prejudice with which we might be disposed to open or conduct that investigation. If Bacon was servile and selfish, at all events he did not attain his object. On the whole, we acquire a very fair idea of the worth of Mr. Dixon's book from observing the tranquil contempt with which Mr. Spedding, a scholar of a very different stamp, treats his labours on the only occasion when he thinks it worth while to refer to them, and when by the way it is for the purpose of correcting an error (vol. i. p. 386). As a writer in the Quarterly Review remarked some years ago, "it is one of the be

setting sins of modern historians to start with some preconceived idea, and to make all events fall in with their imaginary notions." Precisely in this way has Mr. Dixon sinned; and he has sinned still more in a point on which most modern biographers are little open to accusation-he has not taken the proper pains to acquire all the material calculated to throw light upon his subject.

This constitutes one prime point of difference between his own careless and ill-written book and the laborious and scholarly work of Mr. Spedding, the first two volumes of which are now before us. This first instalment of the Letters and Life of Bacon cover all that is known of him from his twentieth year-the date of his first letter being 1580-down to the trial and condemnation of the Earl of Essex. It will be in accordance with our purpose if, passing over much that is of great interest and forbearing to transcribe any account of the way in which Bacon lived during these weary years of embarrassment and failure, we proceed at once to consider Mr. Spedding's view of Bacon's conduct in the important Essex episode, of which so much use has been made in traducing his character. Mr. Dixon's defence of Bacon in this matter may be briefly summed up thus :— Essex had no claim upon Bacon's gratitude, because but for his impetuosity and rashness the Queen would have made Bacon Solicitor-general, and she did violence to her own favourable inclination towards Bacon in order to punish his patron ;-the estate which the Earl is said to have given to Bacon, by way of compensation for the disappointment he had just suffered, was no gift at all, but a, land payment to "his lawyer or man of political business ;" -Essex came up from Wanstead for the express purpose of getting his name put on the committee hostile to two bills for whose safe carriage Bacon was anxious, thus showing that there was a serious estrangement between the two;-Elizabeth, meanwhile, had been showering favours on Bacon, and when it came to a downright issue between the Queen and the Earl, Bacon was more bound by gratitude to her than to his former patron. Mr. Spedding's work, which is an edition of Bacon's writings and not a specific defence of Bacon's conduct, does not enter into this question so directly and fully. After furnishing all the material which can possibly bear upon the controversy, and elucidating its full meaning, the editor leaves the reader to arrange it as he will with reference to the accusations against Bacon. He says that for himself he has no fault to find with Bacon for any part of his conduct to Essex; closer examination only confirms his opinion; and he cannot think that any of the objections which have been urged against Bacon's conduct in this matter would naturally suggest themselves to a reasonable person in reading the story as he has told it. He promises, however, that he will have to return to the subject in connection with the Apology—a work belonging to a later period. The mass of documents bearing upon the trial, and the tone in which Mr. Spedding shows that we ought to interpret them, are arguments more conclusive and irrefragable than any amount of direct objection and answer. We see that the zeal against Essex, which is said to have been more than would have been justifiable towards a mere stranger, was no more than the upright discharge of professional or official duty, and that what has been called an exertion of his professional talents to shed the Earl's

himself unable to say what impression this Declaration made upon the public at the time of its appearance, but is of opinion that "it had its effect probably in satisfying impartial minds of the then living generation." So far as we can judge from all that is known of the contemporary history, Macaulay's assertion that Bacon's conduct excited at the time great and general disapprobation, though prefaced by the phrase "it is certain," is entirely devoid of accuracy, and resulted from a confusion between the popular sentiments at the time of Essex's execution, and that which was entertained some twenty years after, when the unpopularity of the Spanish match threw a halo of glory round every name conspicuous for hostility to Spain, and Essex became the representative of the popular cause. Essex, in the words of Mr. Spedding, "reappeared in all the colours of romance, the invincible captain in whose face nothing Spanish could ever stand; the patriotic councillor whose patriotism had brought upon him the hatred of wicked men, who by malicious intrigues and false accusations pursued him to death; the true narrative sinking by necessary consequence into a slanderous libel." But though this explanation is tolerably satisfactory, future historians or biographers may, perhaps, be able to furnish a more direct account of what the feeling of the public at the time really was, and how far it censured Bacon or cleared him of any undue acrimony or excess of duty in the conduct of the trial. would be the true test. It is not fair to condemn him by the standard of our own age; neither, on the other hand, will any amount of special pleading secure his acquittal if those who were immediately contemporary to the transaction pronounced against him.

This

Mr. Spedding's labours enable us to furnish several instances of Macaulay's bold method of dealing with facts. Macaulay in his usual brilliant style tells us that Bacon rose very rapidly into business, and soon entertained hopes of being called within the bar. Mr. Spedding, on the other hand, shows from authentic sources that the strongest argument against Bacon's pretensions to the office of Attorney-general lay in his want of practice. His enemies said that he had never entered the place of battle." Whether this want of practice arose from his not being able to find clients, or from his not caring to seek them, is uncertain. Neither is the question of any serious interest, but it serves to illustrate how much easier it is to dash off a smart sentence than to discover and state simple facts. Again, in reference to the letter to the Lord Keeper, which, according to Macaulay, "may keep in countenance the most unmanly of the epistles which Cicero wrote during his banishment," Mr. Spedding shows that its whole tone is that of justification and not of apology. But we have not space for the exposure of all the misrepresentations that are made to the reader by means of this epigrammatic and allusive style. Mr. Spedding's two volumes furnish most adequate materials for such an exposure. It will be soon enough to attempt a new and a fairer estimate of Bacon when Mr. Spedding's labours are finished, and the Letters and Life are complete. There will then be room for some second Macaulay to instruct the public in Bacon's character, and to show the converse of the dark portrait which now passes current for his likeness.

blood was only the proper performance of the duty which The Public Life of Lord Macaulay.

he had not sought for, but which devolved upon him by the Queen's command. Then the Declaration, which Macaulay and others seem to regard as a deliberate and gratuitous attempt on Bacon's part "to blacken the Earl's memory," is shown, from Bacon's own account of it, to have been drawn up by him in accordance with a command from the Queen; he received minute instructions from her as to the mode of its construction; the draft was amended by the principal councillors, and finally corrected by the Queen herself, the effect of her alterations, according to Mr. Spedding, being "apparently to impart to the composition a somewhat harder and colder tone than he had given, or than he liked." Mr. Spedding confesses

EXT to a bad character a bad biographer is about the worst thing a man can leave behind him. Mr. Arnold's services were freely supplied, and he can have no reason fairly to object to their being as freely criticised. But if he has not brought much judgment to the work, he has at any rate laid under contribution a great deal of enthusiasm; and on the whole perhaps the memory of Lord Macaulay will be put to a harder trial than will the indulgence of those

• The Public Life of Lord Macaulay. By the Rev. Frederick Arnold. Tinsley.

about worthy of his hire; but it does seem to us to have been a very great mistake to set all the world thinking again over the terms. The Whigs had used him; they had made him a Peer for the way he wrote against the Tories; but posterity-if ever this volume shall be carried down to guide it—is not likely to look on the partisan as the historian, or to appreciate, on public grounds, Lord Macaulay's title to Westminster Abbey. Mr. Arnold himself will scarcely assert that Lord Macaulay would have got a hearing if his sentences had been less taking, and his libels had been less gaudily set out. Everybody has read his history, but nobody as history. As it has been well said, "It is repudiated at Oxford, and not sanctioned at Cambridge-the universities of the English world have condemned it." The worthlessness of the offering was unanswerably pointed out in the Times, and Lord Macaulay's ignorance was often so transparent that even Mr. Hepworth Dixon was able by himself to indicate it. And yet this history was the work of Lord Macaulay's life. It became light reading at young ladies' schools after a chapter in Hume had been just tolerated, and they read it through without missing any-and what has become of it now? What error that might have been made worse by time has it not confirmed? What did it ever proclaim? An eternity of Whiggism as the only possible hereafter and yet before the patent of his peerage was hardly made out, the decomposition of "Liberalism" had fairly begun. He not only failed to show that the Whigs had been full of innocence; but he was unable to secure for their present succession a treasury bench full of cousins. It is true enough that, like those fictions of which they are a sect, what he wrote has been cheapened and still sells; but Mr. Arnold's volume has only made us remember of the man who was to have whitewashed the Whigs of the past, that when he began to scrape them they were so discoloured that he found he could not get off the distemper, and also that he hardly survived their complete catastrophe.

who may take up this volume. It seems that Mr. Frederick Arnold has been in the habit of contributing articles to literary papers, and had the bad luck to get them printed in a journal that could not be got to live long after. We do not mean to say that his essays had any tendency to induce mortality; here they are again in an octavo that it is presumed will live; but he liked them so well himself that he was sure they came to journalism too late to relieve it, and that if they were properly re-introduced they would be heard of again to advantage. But it is due to Mr. Arnold himself to say that, whilst he is rather fond of them, he is quite conscious that the matter might have been handled a great deal better. He waited for the sort of public life to appear of Lord Macaulay that appears of most public men, good, bad, and indifferent. There was nothing, however, but a great silence. So Mr. Arnold seized his scissors and his paste, and from the corpse of the Literary Gazette cut the chief part of this volume. We do not so much complain of the cuttings, as that they were ever cut. We should have thought it might very well have occurred to this gentleman that the silence of Lord Macaulay's friends and parasites was a very suggestive commentary on his whole public life. He might have been very sure that if they had had anything to say that would have put Lord Macaulay's public life in a better public position, they would have said it. Mr. Arnold must see, or he should see, that he has done the very worst thing he could for the memory of the man he reverences with perfect sincerity. He has made people ask, who had no mind to ask it before, how it comes to be that, after a suspicious pause, the office of keeping the memory of Lord Macaulay's public life agreeably conspicuous has become centred in the papers that went down with the wreck of an unhappy print. People will ask, "Where are those who stood round the bier at Poet's Corner? Where the statesmen-where the men of letters ?" The truth is, in getting this question at all properly answered, Mr. Arnold has made himself responsible for a great deal. Like a man who came honestly to his work, he seems to know it; but though he believes his work to be very poorly done, and whilst most people will applaud his frankness, and not disturb his estimate, the book, if it is too often a mere unmixed panegyric, is not on the whole at all a useless contribution. But it But it is too big; and the writer's style has not caught much of the fascination of his hero. But after all, what is there of Lord Macaulay's public life that had better not be forgotten? Could he but have made himself heard before the fervour of Mr. Arnold's allegiance, it may be conceived that he would have said, " My work was to revivify the Whigs and to destroy the Church connection. I don't seem to have succeeded. alone." Perhaps if Mr. Arnold's zeal had not found any one to publish it, in the course of things it might have been forgotten that no public man that ever lived has left behind him so unmanageable a memory as has Lord Macaulay; it is not likely that even that of Lord Russell himself will suffer much more by a close analysis. But here, when everybody seemed disposed to be silent about it, when the Conservative reaction was declaring the hopelessness of any Whig revival, and when every sign of the times confirmed the weakness of Lord Macaulay's appeal in behalf of the "Liberals," Mr. Arnold is not to be restrained from challenging a verdict in his idol's favour. The truth is that Lord Macaulay debauched the people of this country for a number of years by the showy periods that he set out before them. It was clear enough to him that whatever he wrote they would read. Under these circumstances he was very well worth retaining; and the Whigs retained him. But it is hardly too much to assume that Lord Macaulay, with all his brilliancy, never quite persuaded any one to think better of the Whigs-not even Mr. Frederick Arnold; at least the results of his advocacy do not anywhere appear on the face of events. The public life of Lord Macaulay has left just one of those memories that neither friend nor parasite, until the present, has cared to touch. He was hired by a party.

Let me

He was

Lord Macaulay was in truth about the last man to write history at all. It is indeed very probable that the man who wrote for a party will at the present be much more thought of than the man who writes for posterity; and it is perhaps only after reading Mr. Arnold's work that it is possible to understand how little Lord Macaulay's influence, other than as a pamphleteer, will be felt by the hereafter. We do not suppose that Mr. Arnold intended this to be the chief result of reading his book; but if it shows-as it clearly does-how very unreliable Lord Macaulay always was, the benevolence of reintroducing these papers is sure to be acknowledged. Nor is Lord Macaulay's influence on events the more likely to be admitted when his sneers at the Church party are contrasted with the paramount influence adjudged to all Church questions just now in Parliament. Mr. Andrew Steuart indeed tells us that the Church is getting so great an ascendancy that he cannot bring himself to stop in Parliament to see her supremacy confirmed. As Lord Macaulay's adoration of the Whigs was answered by the demoralisation of "Liberalism," his panegyrics on the Puritans and on the Providential interposition of William III. are just now replied to by a Church revival throughout the land. Perhaps after all Mr. Arnold will deserve to be better thanked for his reminder of all this than he will be. The country will be able to feel that it can read Lord Macaulay's volumes without being asked to feel that it is doing more than playing with history; that his hatred for the Tories has borne fruit in a great constitutional revival; and that the same generation that crowded round the inauguration of his "history," has busied itself already with exposing its worthlessness. As a book, Mr. Arnold's volume is very much beneath its subject, and a great many people will ask, "Is this the best thing that could be done for Lord Macaulay?" No matter: some purposes will at least be served. It tells us something of the life of Lord Macaulay at Cambridge, of his visit to India, and of his return, of his parliamentary career and speeches, some of which are given and this is all. But the history of the time in which Lord

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