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progresses, each as a chapter complete in itself, those brilliant papers" on Sir William Temple, and the War of Succession in Spain, and Walpole, and Chatham, which we all know and esteem right well. He has not much altered his pace or his gait in advancing from Review (once a quarter) to History (once in seven years), far less mounted on stilts, or stiffened into the traditional dignity" of History. He is as rich in enlivening details, piquant asides, and pleasant personal talk, as when his theme was Moore's Life of Byron or Boswell's Life of Johnson. He fails not to put on record any bit of gossip that will amuse, any choice ana that will tell. How William, when the Princess Anne dined with him, and when the first green peas of the year were put on the table, devoured the whole dish without offering a spoonful to her Royal Highness; how a certain Jacobite clergyman, after performing divine service on a fast day appointed by William and Mary, dined on a pigeon pie, and while he cut it up, uttered a wish that it was the usurper's heart; how Sherlock was henpecked out of non-juror principles by a high-spirited Xantippe who cared much more about her house and carriage, the plenty of her table and the prospects of her children, than about the patriarchal origin of government or the meaning of the word Abdication; how William was sometimes provoked into horsewhipping his coachmen, footmen, and cooks out of the trenches before Namur, when he caught them skulking there to get a peep at the fighting;-no illustration of this kind, be it fiction or fact, is refused if it can be turned to account. The liberal drafts Mr. Macaulay makes on capital of this coinage, go far to explain the popularity he commands at circulating libraries. Novel-readers vow that his History reads like a novel. He would not thank them for the compliment -(they suppose it to be one). But he may thank his knowledge. of popular tastes, and his ability to suit them by an unstinted seasoning of the "savoury" and the "spicy," for much of the demand which justifies Mudie's order of 2750 copies of the History, for a single library. How can that History be other than readable, and in request, which is so cunningly interspersed with tidbits about the Fat Man of Londonderry, and the tossing in a blanket of the Mayor of Scarborough, and the hole-and-corner tactics of the Jacobite press; and the account of the Imperial noble who swallowed so many bumpers, in honour of William's visit to the Hague, that he tumbled into the turf fire, and was not pulled out till his fine velvet suit had been burned; and of the multitude of dogs that came to feast on the carnage of the battle-field of Aghrim, and that "became so fierce, and acquired such a taste for human flesh, that it was long dangerous for men to travel this road otherwise than in companies;" and of the feud between the New and Old East India Companies, which was sometimes as serious an impediment to the course of true love in London as the feud of the

Capulets and Montagues had been in Verona; and of the fashion among the beauties of Paris, after the battle of Steinkirk (when every Parisian jeweller devised Steinkirk buckles, and every perfumer kept Steinkirk scent), to wear round their necks kerchiefs of the finest lace studiously disarranged, in imitation of the disordered cravats of the fine gentlemen who won that battle, and which kerchiefs were thenceforth known in every salon, street, and shop, as "Steinkirks;" and of the lucky hackney-coachman in London who, at the time of the great rewards offered after the Assassination Plot (1696), caught his traitor, received his thousand pounds, and set up as a gentleman. What can be more diverting, in its way, than Mr. Macaulay's description of the Congress of Ryswick, and the ludicrous formalities, petty jealousies, peddling feuds, and solemn mummeries of the diplomatic grandees? how days were spent in settling how many carriages, horses, lacqueys, and pages each minister should be entitled to bring to Ryswick-whether the serving-men should carry canes and wear swords-whether the Austrian ambassadors had a right to sit the two together at the head of the table, and to resist the Spanish ambassador, who tried to thrust himself in between them. "The chief business of Harlay [the French plenipotentiary] and Kaunitz [the head of the Imperial legation] was to watch each other's legs. Neither of them thought it consistent with the dignity of the Crown which he served to advance towards the other faster than the other advanced towards him. If therefore one of them perceived that he had inadvertently stepped forward too quick, he went back to the door, and the stately minuet began again. The ministers of Lewis drew up a paper in their own language. The German statesmen protested against this innovation, this insult to the dignity of the Holy Roman Empire, this encroachment on the rights of independent nations, and would not know anything about the paper till it had been translated from good French into bad Latin. In the middle of April it was known to everybody at the Hague that Charles the Eleventh, King of Sweden, was dead, and had been succeeded by his son: but it was contrary to etiquette that any of the assembled envoys should appear to be acquainted with this fact till Lilienroth [the Swedish minister] had made a formal announcement: it was not less contrary to etiquette that Lilienroth should make such an announcement till his equipages and his household had been put into mourning; and some weeks elapsed before his coachmakers and his tailors had completed their task. At length, on the twelfth of June, he came to Ryswick in a carriage lined with black and attended by servants in black liveries, and these, in full congress, proclaimed that it had pleased God to take to himself the most puissant King Charles the Eleventh. All the ambassadors then condoled with him on the sad and unexpected news, and went home to put off their embroidery and to dress themselves in

the garb of sorrow. In such solemn trifling week after week passed away. No real progress was made. Lilienroth had no wish to accelerate matters. While that congress lasted, his position was one of great dignity. He would willingly have gone on mediating for ever; and he could not go on mediating, unless the parties on his right and on his left went on wrangling." Mr. Macaulay is too fond of antitheses, of all sorts, not to draw a sketch (in relief) of the very contrary proceedings of the two warriors who really settled the Treaty of Ryswick, while the Ryswick red-tapists and routinists were talking about it and about it-showing us how Boufflers and Portland walked up and down the walks of a roadside orchard, for a couple of hours, and, in that time, did much more business than the plenipotentaries* at Ryswick were able to despatch in as many months. Great was the indignation of the Ryswick Congress, when its august members learned that Boufflers and Portland were negotiating in this "most

*Were the historian a Frenchman, and that Frenchman a Villemain or a Guizot, one may suppose that in this fling at the solemn nothings of the Ryswick Congress, as well as in scores of instances besides, some satirical allusion was meant to current or recent events in our politics of to-day. It would be assumed as certain, for example, that Mr. Macaulay must have had in view a noble ex-Minister of War (whose title also begins with N), when he tells us that "Nottingham, honest, industrious, versed in civil business, and eloquent in parliamentary debate, was deficient in the qualities of a war minister, and was not at all aware of his deficiencies."

Or, again, that he was unquestionably thinking of Sir James Graham and Sir Charles Napier when he describes the return home of Admiral Russell in 1692: "The armament returned to Saint Helens, to the astonishment and disgust of the whole nation. The ministers blamed the commanders: the commanders blamed the ministers. The recriminations exchanged between Nottingham and Russell were loud and angry."

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Or, again, that he was giving his sentence on the results of a divided command in the Black Sea, when he wrote about the superiority that Lewis's navy, "moved by one will," enjoyed over the allied navies of England and Holland, as subject to different authorities," &c. And that he was assailing the Peelites in his exposé of an opinion growing (1693) among the Tories, that the policy of England ought to be strictly insular," and "that England ought never to attempt great military operations on the Continent." And that he was undeniably thinking of Mr. Disraeli when sketching a certain orator of 1693: "No speaker of that time seems to have had, in such large measure, both the power and the inclination to give pain." And-as a final instancethat he was incontestably standing up for himself when standing up for Charles Montague: "People are very loth to admit that the same man can unite very different kinds of excellence. It is soothing to envy to believe that what is splendid cannot be solid, that what is clear cannot be profound. Very slowly was the public brought to acknowledge that Mansfield was a great jurist, and that Burke was a great master of political science. Montague was a brilliant rhetorician, and, therefore, though he had ten times Harley's capacity for the driest parts of business, was represented by detractors as a superficial prating pretender."

In fact, the number of similar mares-nests a commentator of mares-nesting habits might discover in these volumes, is past reckoning. For in mares-nesting in particular, as in life in general, where there's a will there's a way.

irregular and indecorous manner, without credentials, or mediation, or notes, or protocols, without counting each other's steps, and without calling each other Excellency. So barbarously ignorant were they of the rudiments of the noble science of diplomacy that they had very nearly accomplished the work of restoring peace to Christendom while walking up and down an alley under some apple-trees."

Occasionally, it must be owned by all "sober-judging" men, the historian's introduction of extras, to set off his narrative, is a little gratuitous. Most of us could spare, it is likely, digressions (especially if the time and space they consume go to swell the chances against the History ever being finished) about the present aspect and statistics of Belfast, or that passage which tells us where 66 now stands, on a verdant bank, amidst noble woods, Slane Castle, the mansion of the Marquess of Conyngham,”—or of the present appearance of Limerick," those smooth and broad pavements, those neat gardens, those stately shops flaming with red brick, and gay with shawls and china," and of Cork with its now "stately houses of banking companies, railway companies, and insurance companies," &c. It is highly characteristic of the author, that, in his examination of Dalrymple's guilt in the Massacre of Glencoe, he should represent him as being too well-read in history not to know how great rulers had, in Scotland and elsewhere, dealt with such banditti as Mac Ian and his clan-suggesting that he, the wily Master of Stair, doubtless knew with what energy and what severity James the Fifth had put down the mosstroopers of the border; how the chief of Henderland had been hung over the gate of the castle in which he had prepared a banquet for the king; how John Armstrong and his thirty-six horsemen, when they came forth to welcome their sovereign, had scarcely been allowed time to say a single prayer before they were all tied up and turned off. Nor probably, Mr. Macaulay goes on to surmise more suo, was the Master of Stair ignorant of the means by which Sixtus the Fifth had cleared the ecclesiastical state of outlawshow that pontiff, finding there was one formidable gang which could not be dislodged from a stronghold among the Apennines, sent beasts of burden loaded with poisoned food and wine, by a road which ran close to the fastness-and how the robber duly sallied forth, seized the prey, feasted and died—and how the pious old Pope exulted greatly when he heard that the corpses of thirty ruffians, till now the terror of many peaceful villages, had been found lying among the mules and packages. No wonder if this History of England be very voluminous, and unrivalled in attraction to miscellaneous readers, when the Historian can so pleasantly hale in by the pontifical head and shoulders, his Holiness, Sixtus the Fifth -to say nothing of Johnny Armstrong and his merry, merry men all to suggest a possible train of thought in the hard head of the Scottish Secretary, in rê Glencoe.

The horrible tale of the Massacre is told with great force and dramatic effect. William's complicity in the tragedy is denied outright, if not disproved outright; and upon the Master of Stair is made to rest the burden of the sin. Whether in writing up William, through evil report and good report, or in writing down Marlborough and others, systematically and with something very like malice prepense, Mr. Macaulay shows far more of the advocate than the judge, and sometimes has all the outward and visible signs of a special pleader.

When discussing the order directed to the Commander of the Forces in Scotland, which runs thus: "As for Mac Ian of Glencoe and that tribe, if they can be well distinguished from the other Highlanders, it will be proper, for the vindication of public justice, to extirpate that set of thieves,"-it is asserted by Mr. Macaulay that these words "naturally bear a sense perfectly innocent," and that they would, but for the horrible event which followed, have been universally understood in that sense. But when it is a Jacobite Form of Prayer and Humiliation that he is analysing, he is less apt to see a "perfectly innocent" sense in the clauses of supplication. "Give the King the necks of his enemies," he interprets to be a prayer for another Bloody Circuit. "Raise him up friends abroad," to be a prayer for a French invasion. And, "Do some great thing for him, which we in particular know not how to pray for,"-to be a prayer the best comment on which was afterwards furnished by the Assassination Plot.

His summing up of the character of his hero, William of Orange, is yet to come; but the length and breadth and depth and height of its panegyrics can be fairly conjectured, from the eulogies that already abound wherever opportunity occurs, or can be made. The King's figure is made to stand out in all the brighter relief by contrast with the statesmen, en masse, of his adopted country. The Whigs of the Revolution, as well as the Tories, are sadly mauled, as many of them thoroughly deserve. William "in general was indulgent, nay, wilfully blind to the baseness of the English statesmen whom he employed." "He knew them too well to complain because he did not find in them veracity, fidelity, consistency, disinterestedness." Hence his slowness to share in the irritation that broke out, now and then, against this or that better or worser specimen of a bad lot: on occasion of the outcry against Sunderland, for example, in 1697, William's feeling was, that Sunderland was able, was useful,-was unprincipled indeed, but then so were all English politicians of that breed which the Restoration had formed and had bequeathed to the Revolution. Sunderland, he felt, was a fair specimen of his class: "a little worse, perhaps, than Leeds or Godolphin, and about as bad as Russell or Marlborough. Why he was to be hunted from the herd the King could not imagine." Mr. Macaulay's artistic studies