"This is a subject which, if we may judge from Mr. Burke's frequent recurrence to it in his writings, has often thwarted and exasperated him in his passage through life. It was likely to do so. His character is not only pure from the low vices of these vulgar politicians, but may possibly be suspected of some bias towards the opposite extreme. Perhaps something more of flexibility of character and accommodation of temper-a mind more broken down to the practice of the world-would have fitted him better for the exertion of that art which is the sole instrument of political wisdom, and without which the highest political wisdom is but barren speculation-we mean the art of guiding and managing mankind. The very passage before us, when we compare it with the general scheme of policy proposed by Mr. Burke, furnishes a remarkable proof of the truth of the observation which we have hazarded. How could Mr. Burke have forgotten that these vulgar politicians were the only tools with which he had to work, in reducing his scheme to practice? These creatures of the desk and creatures of favour unfortunately govern Europe. These narrow and selfish men were the sole instruments that could be employed in realising schemes, of which the success (according to Mr. Burke's own representation) depended on their disinterestedness. There were no other men posThe ends of generosity were

sessed of power to carry the plan into execution. to be compassed alone through the agency of the selfish; and the objects of prospective wisdom were to be attained by the exertions of the short-sighted. There never was a project in which the means and the end were so fatally at variance. It was a scheme of policy, to be carried into execution by men who, from the statement of Mr. Burke, and from the very necessity of their character, must deride the whole plan as chimerical. It is surely not a little remarkable, that he, who as an observer of human life, has so admirably painted the character of these men, and, as a speculative philosopher, has so well traced their conduct to its principles, should, as a practical politician, have so utterly overlooked the inefficiency of the only tools which he had to employ."

There is in the fulness and earnestness of this passage something like secret fellow-feeling. The ambition and pride of Mackintosh had already known disappointments and disgusts. He concludes with a panegyric on Fox, somewhat unexpectedly and awkwardly introduced; and suggested, perhaps, by the very consciousness of receding from him. The base-minded follow up their desertion of a party, a principle, or a friend, by malice and defamation;—better spirits are but the more scrupulously and studiously just, by way, perhaps, of disguising or atoning for their own infirmity even to themselves :

"We cannot close a subject on which we are serious, even to melancholy, without offering the slender but unbiassed tribute of our admiration and thanks to that illustrious statesman, the friend of (what we must call) the better days of Mr. Burke, whose great talents have been devoted to the cause of liberty and of mankind; who, of all men, most ardently loves, because he most thoroughly understands, the British constitution; who has made a noble and memorable, though unavailing, struggle to preserve us from the evils and dangers of the present war; who is requited for the calumny of his enemies, the desertion of his friends, and the ingratitude of his country, by the approbation of his own conscience, and by a well-grounded expectation of the gratitude and reverence of posterity, who never

can reflect on the event of this great man's counsels, without calling to mind that beautiful passage of Cicero, in which he deplores the death of his illustrious rival, Hortensius: Si fuit tempus ullum cum extorquere arma posset e manibus iratorum civium boni civis auctoritas et oratio; tum profecto fuit cum patrocinium pacis exclusum est aut errore hominum aut timore."

In a subsequent number of the Monthly Review Mackintosh resumes the subject, for the purpose of controverting the opinions expressed in the eloquent war-whoop of Burke. It would seem to be an after-thought, and is executed in a tone of languor, disinclination, and humility.

Lord (then Mr.) Erskine's "View of the Causes and Consequences of the War," passed through the friendly ordeal of the Monthly Review, in the hands of Sir James Mackintosh. The aim of the reviewer was rather to manage or minister to the vanity of the author, than characterise his talents or his work, and no extract would instruct or interest the reader.

Gibbon's posthumous works, and Roscoe's "Life of Lorenzo de' Medici," are the only standard or important publications of the day, in literature, reviewed by him. In treating the latter, he scarcely goes out of the contents of the history, and does not characterise the historian otherwise than by general eulogies, coloured with the partiality of friendship. The reviewer, indeed, whatever his general reading, was not sufficiently acquainted with the history of Italy in the various arts of civilisation at the period, to follow and judge the author. To decide upon the merits of such a work, the critic should have gone over the ground trodden by the historian, and, perhaps, travelled even beyond him. Hence it is that so few reviews of works of research deserve credit and authority. There are doubtless exceptions, and two may be cited: the review of Dr. Wordsworth on the Eikon Basilike, by Sir James Mackintosh,* and that upon a passage of Dr. Lingard's "History of England," avowed by Mr. Allen.* But the critics, in both instances, were stimulated by the interests of personal controversy and their reputations.

The genius, the style, the character, and the opinions of Gibbon, would be expected to bring the faculties of Sir James Mackintosh into full play. He has merely noticed in passing a few traits of the man rather than of the writer, and has left almost untouched the historian of the Roman empire. The review, for the most part,

* Ed. Rev. No. LXXXVII.

contains only the substance of the Memoirs of Gibbon, extracted and compressed for the use of the reader. There are, however, a few passages which have the merits of eloquence and discrimination. After citing Gibbon's account of the theological fluctuations of Chillingworth, he remarks upon it as follows:

"To this eloquent account we have only one objection, that it too lightly adopts that rumour which was propagated against Chillingworth by the bigots and impostors of his own age, of his having subdivided into that philosophic indifference, which might have been honourable in the eyes of Mr. Gibbon, but which we do not believe to have been so in those of Chillingworth. To adopt the charges of bigots is not worthy of a philosopher. Chillingworth was called an infidel, by the zealots of his age, because he was moderate, candid, and rational; in the same manner that impostors, clad in the disguise of bigots, now call Priestley worse than an atheist! The Christianity of Chillingworth is certainly not altogether in dogma, and not at all in spirit, the same with that of Horsley: but it is perfectly coincident, both in doctrine and spirit, with the Christianity of Locke and Clarke, of Watson and Paley. As long as the religion of the Gospel continues to be professed and defended in its own genuine spirit, by the greatest masters of human reason, it can neither be exposed by the scoffs of enemies, nor even endangered by the fury of pretended friends.”

"I was directed," says Gibbon, "to the writings of Swift and Addison. Wit and simplicity are their common attributes; but the style of Swift is supported by manly original vigour; that of Addison is adorned by the female graces of elegance and mildness. The perfect composition, the nervous language, the well-turned periods of Dr. Robertson, inflamed me to the ambitious hope that I might one day tread in his footsteps. The calm philosophy, the careless inimitable beauties of his friend and rival, often forced me to close the volume with a mixed sensation of delight and despair." Upon this passage in the Memoirs of Gibbon the reviewer makes the following observation :

"The reader will not learn without wonder that Swift and Addison were among the earliest models on which our celebrated historian laboured to form his taste and style. If the composition of these writers continued to be the object of his imitation, the history of literature does not afford so striking an example of a man of such great talents so completely disappointed in his purpose. It may be observed that, even in the very act of characterising Swift and Addison, he has deviated not a little from the beautiful simplicity which is the peculiar distinction of those pure and classical writers. Nor can we think that Mr. Gibbon, however he may have in some measure emulated the historical merit, has exactly trodden in the literary footsteps of Dr. Robertson. Inferior, probably, to Mr. Gibbon, in the vigour of his powers; unequal to him, perhaps, in comprehension of intellect, and variety of knowledge; the Scottish historian has far surpassed him in simplicity and perspicuity of narration; in picturesque and pathetic description; in the sober use of

figurative language; and in the delicate perception of that scarcely discernible boundary which separates ornament from exuberance, and elegance from affectation. He adorns more chastely in addressing the imagination; he narrates more clearly for the understanding; and he describes more affectingly for the heart. The defects of Dr. Robertson arise from a less vigorous intellect; the faults of Mr. Gibbon from a less pure taste. If Mr. Gibbon be the greater man, Dr. Robertson is the better writer."

Hume said, in a letter to Gibbon, "Your use of the French tongue has led you into a style more poetical and figurative, and more highly coloured, than our language seems to admit of in historical composition: for such is the practice of the French writers, particularly the more modern ones, who illuminate their pictures more than custom will permit us." The following remarks of Sir J. Mackintosh, though perhaps not quite applicable to Gibbon, or quite just to the French writers of the age of Louis XV., are, in the abstract, most valuable, and profoundly just :

:

"As France had attained, perhaps, somewhat sooner than Great Britain, the Augusta age of pure taste, so her degeneracy was proportionably more early. Those ingenious and happy turns of thought, which give an occasional and unaffected brilliancy to the productions of good writers, were pursued with such avidity, that the pages of French authors were crowded with showy conceits. That natural grandeur which belongs to the effusions of genius, betrayed a rabble of inferior writers into a perpetual effort, which produced nothing but a cold and insipid fustian. The passion for a degree of precision, perhaps greater than the freedom of popular discourse will admit, which is so natural in a speculative age, infected language with false refinement and fantastic subtilty. Even the variety and the extent of knowledge were injurious to taste; for it gave rise to allusions and similitudes drawn from sciences which must ever be inaccessible to the majority of readers, and thus produced a deviation from that address to the universal sentiments and sympathy of mankind, which is an indispensable quality of good writing. Style became an art instead of a talent, and lost its value because it might be used without genius. The ornaments of composition, when they appear to be suggested by the occasion, and to flow from the imagination of the writer, are natural and charming; but, when they are perpetually repeated, they are viewed with indifference, and even with disgust, as the easy tricks of a rhetorician. In this stage of literary progress, the ear, rendered fastidious by the music of those finished periods which are artfully scattered throughout classical compositions, requires an effeminate preference of sound to energy and meaning, and produces a monotonous cadence, destructive of that very harmony to which so many other excellencies are sacrificed. Such is the progress, perhaps the inevitable progress, to which the literature of nations is subjected; and such are some of the faults, which, to the simple and austere taste of Mr. Hume, probably appeared to have infected, in some degree, the composition of Mr. Gibbon."

When Sir James Mackintosh wrote those observations, the age of Louis XIV. had an undisputed pre-eminence in French litera

ture. The French writers of the succeeding epoch were charged with degeneracy and false taste, compared with their immediate predecessors. This depreciation of the age of Louis XV. may be ascribed to the writers themselves who figured in it. Voltaire, and the other men of genius, whose works constitute its literature, exalted their predecessors from generous admiration; the meaner multitude of scribblers, from envy of contemporary fame; and Europe took its tone from the universal voice of France. The share which the French philosophers of the eighteenth century were supposed to have in preparing the Revolution, increased the tendency to exalt an age in which genius prostrated itself with the same blind obedience before the altar and the throne. The high Protestant alarmists for social order in England forgot that the loyalty of that age in France was slavery, and its devotion idolatry. Even the antipathies of religion will give way, for a moment, to some other passion or interest still more grovelling. But opinion has been re-adjusted in France, and in other countries; a higher range and greater compass of intellect are conceded to the age of Louis XV.; and its writers are commended, not censured, for giving freedom and variety to French style. It is assuredly a merit, not a vice, in the literature of an age, to have produced, at the same time, the pure and perfect masterpieces of Voltaire, the redundant and impassioned eloquence of Rousseau, the style, emphatically so called, of Buffon, the sententious vigour and brilliant contrasts of Montesquieu. It is easy to impute vicious taste to Montesquieu or Gibbon; but there are few readers, competent to appreciate them, who would not hesitate before they indulged the wish that either the "Spirit of Laws," or the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," had been written in another style. This age, it is true, produced the glittering fustian of Thomas; but that of Louis XIV. had its Pradons and Cottins. The only pre-eminence of the boasted reign of Louis XIV. is in the drama. Corneille and Racine have found a rival, rather than an equal, in Voltaire; and Molière stands alone in unapproached supremacy.

Sir James Mackintosh, in 1797, put forth the prospectus of a course of lectures to be delivered by him on the Law of Nature and Nations. His object may have been to exercise his faculties on a subject which should bring him profit and fame in a region beyond the strife and passions of political party. He had not the temperament of a tribune of the people :-" My nature, perhaps," says he,