Lucca, the most eminent of those Ita- | which heighten the interest, the words, lian chiefs, who, like Pisistratus and the gestures, the looks, are evidently Gelon, acquired a power felt rather furnished by the imagination of the than seen, and resting, not on law or author. The fashion of later times is on prescription, but on the public fa- different. A more exact narrative is vour and on their great personal qua- given by the writer. It may be doubted lities. Such a work would exhibit to whether more exact notions are conus the real nature of that species of so- veyed to the reader. The best portraits vereignty, so singular and so often mis- are perhaps those in which there is a understood, which the Greeks deno- slight mixture of caricature, and we minated tyranny, and which, modified are not certain that the best histories in some degree by the feudal system, are not those in which a little of the reappeared in the commonwealths of exaggeration of fictitious narrative is Lombardy and Tuscany. But this little judiciously employed. Something is composition of Machiavelli is in no lost in accuracy; but much is gained sense a history. It has no pretensions in effect. The fainter lines are neto fidelity. It is a trifle, and not a glected; but the great characteristic very successful trifle. It is scarcely features are imprinted on the mind for more authentic than the novel of Bel-ever. phegor, and is very much duller.

The last great work of this illustrious man was the history of his native city. It was written by command of the Pope, who, as chief of the house of Medici, was at that time sovereign of Florence. The characters of Cosmo, of Piero, and of Lorenzo, are, however, treated with a freedom and impartiality equally honourable to the writer and to the patron. The miseries and humiliations of dependence, the bread which is more bitter than every other food, the stairs which are more painful than every other ascent, had not broken the spirit of Machiavelli. The most corrupting post in a corrupting profession had not depraved the generous heart of Clement.

The History terminates with the death of Lorenzo de' Medici. Machiavelli had, it seems, intended to continue his narrative to a later period. But his death prevented the execution of his design; and the melancholy task of recording the desolation and shame of Italy devolved on Guicciardini.

The

Machiavelli lived long enough to see the commencement of the last struggle for Florentine liberty. Soon after his death monarchy was finally established, not such a monarchy as that of which Cosmo had laid the foundations deep in the institutions and feelings of his countrymen, and which Lorenzo had embellished with the trophies of every science and every art; but a loathsome tyranny, proud and mean, cruel and The History does not appear to be feeble, bigotted and lascivious. the fruit of much industry or research. character of Machiavelli was hateful to It is unquestionably inaccurate. But the new masters of Italy; and those it is elegant, lively, and picturesque, parts of his theory which were in strict beyond any other in the Italian lan- accordance with their own daily pracguage. The reader, we believe, carries tice afforded a pretext for blackening away from it a more vivid and a more his memory. His works were misrefaithful impression of the national cha-presented by the learned, misconstrued racter and manners than from more correct accounts. The truth is, that the book belongs rather to ancient than to modern literature. It is in the style, not of Davila and Clarendon, but of Herodotus and Tacitus. The classical histories may almost be called romances founded in fact. The relation is, no doubt, in all its principal points, strictly true. But the numerous little incidents

by the ignorant, censured by the church, abused with all the rancour of simulated virtue, by the tools of a base government, and the priests of a baser superstition. The name of the man whose genius had illuminated all the dark places of policy, and to whose patriotic wisdom an oppressed people had owed their last chance of emancipation and revenge, passed into a proverb of

infamy For more than two hundred mighty battle, to invest with the reality years his bones lay undistinguished. of human flesh and blood beings whom At length, an English nobleman paid we are too much inclined to consider the last honours to the greatest states- as personified qualities in an allegory, man of Florence. In the church of to call up our ancestors before us with Santa Croce a monument was erected all their peculiarities of language, manto his memory, which is contemplated ners, and garb, to show us over their with reverence by all who can dis- houses, to seat us at their tables, to tinguish the virtues of a great mind rummage their old-fashioned wardthrough the corruptions of a dege-robes, to explain the uses of their ponnerate age, and which will be approached with still deeper homage when the object to which his public life was devoted shall be attained, when the foreign yoke shall be broken, when a second Procida shall avenge the wrongs of Naples, when a happier Rienzi shall restore the good estate of Rome, when the streets of Florence and Bologna shall again resound with their ancient war-cry, Popolo; popolo; muoiano i tiranni!

HALLAM. (SEPTEMBER, 1828.) The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of George II. By HENRY HALLAM. In 2 vols. 1827.

derous furniture, these parts of the duty which properly belongs to the historian have been appropriated by the historical novelist. On the other hand, to extract the philosophy of history, to direct our judgment of events and men, to trace the connection of causes and effects, and to draw from the occurrences of former times general lessons of moral and political wisdom, has become the business of a distinct class of writers.

Of the two kinds of composition into which history has been thus divided, the one may be compared to a map, the other to a painted landscape. The picture, though it places the country before us, does not enable us to ascertain with accuracy the dimensions, the distances, and the angles. The map is not a work of imitative art. It presents no scene to the imagination; but it gives us exact information as to the bearings of the various points, and is a more use ful companion to the traveller or the general than the painted landscape could be, though it were the grandest that ever Rosa peopled with outlaws, or the sweetest over which Claude ever poured the mellow effulgence of a setting sun.

HISTORY, at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy. It impresses general truths on the mind by a vivid representation of particular characters and incidents. But, in fact, the two hostile elements of which it consists have never been known to form a perfect amalgamation; and at length, in our own time, they have been completely and professedly separated. Good histories, in the proper It is remarkable that the practice of sense of the word, we have not. But separating the two ingredients of which we have good historical romances, and history is composed has become pregood historical essays. The imagina-valent on the Continent as well as in tion and the reason, if we may use a this country. Italy has already prolegal metaphor, have made partition of duced a historical novel, of high merit a province of literature of which they and of still higher promise. In France, were formerly seized per my et per tout; the practice has been carried to a length and now they hold their respective por- somewhat whimsical. M. Sismondi tions in severalty, instead of holding publishes a grave and stately history the whole in common. of the Merovingian Kings, very valuable, and a little tedious. He then sends forth as a companion to it a novel, in which he attempts to give a lively representation of characters and man

To make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us in the society of a great man or on the eminence which overlooks the field of a

ners. This course, as it seems to us, | The language, even where most faulty, has all the disadvantages of a division is weighty and massive, and indicates of labour, and none of its advantages. strong sense in every line. It often We understand the expediency of rises to an eloquence, not florid or imkeeping the functions of cook and passioned, but high, grave, and sober; coachman distinct. The dinner will be such as would become a state paper, or better dressed, and the horses better a judgment delivered by a great magismanaged. But where the two situations trate, a Somers or a D'Aguesseau. are united, as in the Maître Jacques of Molière, we do not see that the matter is much mended by the solemn form with which the pluralist passes from one of his employments to the other. We manage these things better in England. Sir Walter Scott gives us a novel; Mr. Hallam a critical and argumentative history. Both are occupied with the same matter. But the former looks at it with the eye of a sculptor. His intention is to give an express and lively image of its external form. The latter is an anatomist. His task is to dissect the subject to its inmost recesses, and to lay bare before us all the springs of motion and all the causes of decay.

In this respect the character of Mr. Hallam's mind corresponds strikingly with that of his style. His work is eminently judicial. Its whole spirit is that of the bench, not that of the bar. He sums up with a calm, steady impartiality, turning neither to the right nor to the left, glossing over nothing, exaggerating nothing, while the advocates on both sides are alternately biting their lips to hear their conflicting misstatements and sophisms exposed. On a general survey, we do not scruple to pronounce the Constitutional History the most impartial book that we ever read. We think it the more incumbent on us to bear this testimony strongly at first setting out, because, in the course of our remarks, we shall think it right to dwell principally on those parts of it from which we dissent.

There is one peculiarity about Mr. Hallam which, while it adds to the value of his writings, will, we fear, take away something from their popularity. He is less of a worshipper than any historian whom we can call to mind. Every political sect has its esoteric and

Mr. Hallam is, on the whole, far better qualified than any other writer of our time for the office which he has undertaken. He has great industry and great acuteness. His knowledge is extensive, various, and profound. His mind is equally distinguished by the amplitude of its grasp, and by the delicacy of its tact. His speculations have none of that vagueness which is the common fault of political philosophy. On the contrary, they are strik-its exoteric school, its abstract doctrines ingly practical, and teach us not only the general rule, but the mode of applying it to solve particular cases. In this respect they often remind us of the Discourses of Machiavelli.

The style is sometimes open to the charge of harshness. We have also here and there remarked a little of that unpleasant trick, which Gibbon brought into fashion, the trick, we mean, of telling a story by implication and allusion. Mr. Hallam, however, has an excuse which Gibbon had not. His work is designed for readers who are already acquainted with the ordinary books on English history, and who can therefore unriddle these little enigmas without difficulty. The manner of the book is, on the whole, not unworthy of the matter.

for the initiated, its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables for the vulgar. It assists the devotion of those who are unable to raise themselves to the contemplation of pure truth by all the devices of Pagan or Papal superstition. It has its altars. and its deified heroes, its relics and pilgrimages, its canonized martyrs and confessors, its festivals and its legendary miracles. Our pious ancestors, we are told, deserted the High Altar of Canterbury, to lay all their oblations on the shrine of St. Thomas. In the same manner the great and comfortable doctrines of the Tory creed, those particularly which relate to restrictions on worship and on trade, are adored by squires and rectors in Pitt

Clubs, under the name of a minister | of goods, or a friend to order without who was as bad a representative of the taking under his protection the foulest system which has been christened after excesses of tyranny. His admiration him as Becket of the spirit of the oscillates between the most worthless of Gospel. On the other hand, the cause rebels and the most worthless of opfor which Hampden bled on the field pressors, between Marten, the disgrace and Sydney on the scaffold is enthusi- of the High Court of Justice, and Laud, astically toasted by many an honest the disgrace of the Star Chamber. He radical who would be puzzled to ex- can forgive any thing but temperance plain the difference between Ship- and impartiality. He has a certain money and the Habeas Corpus Act. It sympathy with the violence of his opmay be added that, as in religion, so in ponents, as well as with that of his aspolitics, few even of those who are en- sociates. In every furious partisan he lightened enough to comprehend the sees either his present self or his former meaning latent under the emblems of self, the pensioner that is, or the Jacotheir faith can resist the contagion of bin that has been. But he is unable to the popular superstition. Often, when comprehend a writer who, steadily atthey flatter themselves that they are tached to principles, is indifferent about merely feigning a compliance with the names and badges, and who judges of prejudices of the vulgar, they are them- characters with equable severity, not selves under the influence of those very altogether untinctured with cynicism, prejudices. It probably was not alto- but free from the slightest touch of gether on grounds of expediency that passion, party spirit, or caprice. Socrates taught his followers to honour the gods whom the state honoured, and bequeathed a cock to Esculapius with his dying breath. So there is often a portion of willing credulity and enthusiasm in the veneration which the most discerning men pay to their political idols. From the very nature of man it must be so. The faculty by which we inseparably associate ideas which have often been presented to us in conjunction is not under the absolute control of the will. It may be quickened into morbid activity. It may be reasoned into sluggishness. But in a certain degree it will always exist. The almost absolute mastery which Mr. Hallam has obtained over feelings of this class is perfectly astonishing to us, and will, we believe, be not only astonishing but offensive to many of his readers. It must particularly disgust those people It is vehemently maintained by some who, in their speculations on politics, writers of the present day that Elizaare not reasoners but fanciers; whose beth persecuted neither Papists nor Puopinions, even when sincere, are not ritans as such, and that the severe meaproduced, according to the ordinary sures which she occasionally adopted law of intellectual births, by induction were dictated, not by religious intoleor inference, but are equivocally gene-rance, but by political necessity. Even rated by the heat of fervid tempers out the excellent account of those times of the overflowing of tumid imaginations. A man of this class is always in extremes. He cannot be a friend to liberty without calling for a community

We should probably like Mr. Hallam's book more if, instead of pointing out with strict fidelity the bright points and the dark spots of both parties, he had exerted himself to whitewash the one and to blacken the other. But we should certainly prize it far less. Eulogy and invective may be had for the asking. But for cold rigid justice, the one weight and the one measure, we know not where else we can look.

No portion of our annals has been more perplexed and misrepresented by writers of different parties than the history of the Reformation. In this labyrinth of falsehood and sophistry the guidance of Mr. Hallam is peculiarly valuable. It is impossible not to admire the even-handed justice with which he deals out castigation to right and left on the rival persecutors.

which Mr. Hallam has given has not altogether imposed silence on the authors of this fallacy. The title of the Queen, they say, was annulled by the