a general scepticism and indifference | the reign of Charles the Second can about principles of government.

only be explained by supposing an No Englishman who has studied at- utter want of principle in the political tentively the reign of Charles the world. On neither side was there fiSecond, will think himself entitled to delity enough to face a reverse. Those indulge in any feelings of national honourable retreats from power which, superiority over the Dictionnaire des in later days, parties have often made, Girouettes. Shaftesbury was surely a with loss, but still in good order, in far less respectable man than Talley- firm union, with unbroken spirit and rand; and it would be injustice even to formidable means of annoyance, were Fouché to compare him with Lauder- utterly unknown. As soon as a check dale. Nothing, indeed, can more clearly took place a total rout followed: arms show how low the standard of political and colours were thrown away. The morality had fallen in this country than vanquished troops, like the Italian merthe fortunes of the two British states- cenaries of the fourteenth and fifteenth men whom we have named. The go- centuries, enlisted on the very field of vernment wanted a ruffian to carry on battle, in the service of the conquerors. the most atrocious system of misgovern- In a nation proud of its sturdy justice ment with which any nation was ever and plain good sense, no party could cursed, to extirpate Presbyterianism by be found to take a firm middle stand fire and sword, by the drowning of between the worst of oppositions and women, by the frightful torture of the the worst of courts. When, on charges boot. And they found him among the as wild as Mother Goose's tales, on the chiefs of the rebellion and the sub-testimony of wretches who proclaimed scribers of the Covenant. The opposi- themselves to be spies and traitors, and tion looked for a chief to head them in the most desperate attacks ever made, under the forms of the Constitution, on any English administration: and they selected the minister who had the deepest share in the worst acts of the Court, the soul of the Cabal, the counsellor who had shut up the Exchequer and urged on the Dutch war. The whole political drama was of the same cast. No unity of plan, no decent propriety of character and costume, could be found in that wild and monstrous harlequinade. The whole was made up of extravagant transformations and burlesque contrasts; Atheists turned Puritans; Puritans turned Atheists; republicans defending the divine right of Kings; prostitute courtiers clamouring for the liberties of the people; judges inflaming the rage of mobs; patriots pocketing bribes from foreign powers; a Popish prince torturing Presbyterians into Episcopacy in one part of the island; Presbyterians cutting off the heads of Popish noblemen and gentlemen in the other. Public opinion has its natural flux and reflux. After a violent burst, there is commonly a reaction. But vicissitudes so extraordinary as those which marked

whom everybody now believes to have been also liars and murderers, the offal of gaols and brothels, the leavings of the hangman's whip and shears, Catholics guilty of nothing but their religion were led like sheep to the Protestant shambles, where were the loyal Tory gentry and the passively obedient clergy? And where, when the time of retribution came, when laws were strained and juries packed to destroy the leaders of the Whigs, when charters were invaded, when Jefferies and Kirke were making Somersetshire what Lauderdale and Graham had made Scotland, where were the ten thousand brisk boys of Shaftesbury, the members of ignoramus juries, the wearers of the Polish medal? All-powerful to destroy others, unable to save themselves, the members of the two parties oppressed and were oppressed, murdered and were murdered, in their turn. No lucid interval occurred between the frantic paroxysms of two contradictory illusions.

To the frequent changes of the government during the twenty years which had preceded the Restoration, this unsteadiness is in a great measure to be attributed. Other causes had also

favourite Duchess stamps about Whitehall, cursing and swearing. The ministers employ their time at the councilboard in making mouths at each other and taking off each other's gestures for the amusement of the King. The Peers at a conference begin to pommel each other and to tear collars and periwigs. A speaker in the House of Commons gives offence to the Court. He is waylaid by a gang of bullies, and his nose is cut to the bone. This ignominious dissoluteness, or rather, if we may venture to designate it by the only proper word, blackguardism of feeling and manners, could not but spread from private to public life. The cynical sneers, the epicurean sophistry, which had driven honour and virtue from one part of the character, extended their influence over every other. The second generation of the statesmen of this reign were worthy pupils of the schools in which they had been trained, of the gaming-table of Grammont, and the tiring-room of Nell. In no other age could such a trifler as Buckingham have exercised any political influence. In no other age could the path to power and glory have been thrown open to the manifold infamies of Churchill.

been at work. Even if the country had | jesty, after a brutal jest, dissects it for the been governed by the house of Crom- amusement of the assembly, and prowell or by the remains of the Long bably of its father among the rest. The Parliament, the extreme austerity of the Puritans would necessarily have produced a revulsion. Towards the close of the Protectorate many signs indicated that a time of license was at hand. But the restoration of Charles the Second rendered the change wonderfully rapid and violent. Profligacy became a test of orthodoxy, and loyalty a qualification for rank and office. A deep and general taint infected the morals of the most influential classes, and spread itself through every province of letters. Poetry inflamed the passions; philosophy undermined the principles; divinity itself, inculcating an abject reverence for the Court, gave additional effect to the licentious example of the Court. We look in vain for those qualities which lend a charm to the errors of high and ardent natures, for the generosity, the tenderness, the chivalrous delicacy, which ennoble appetites into passions, and impart to vice itself a portion of the majesty of virtue. The excesses of that age remind us of the humours of a gang of footpads, revelling with their favourite beauties at a flash-house. In the fashionable libertinism there is a hard, cold ferocity, an impudence, a lowness, a dirtiness, which can be paralleled only among the heroes and heroines The history of Churchill shows, more of that filthy and heartless literature clearly perhaps than that of any other which encouraged it. One nobleman individual, the malignity and extent of of great abilities wanders about as a the corruption which had eaten into the Merry-Andrew. Another harangues heart of the public morality. An Enthe mob stark naked from a window.glish gentleman of good family attaches A third lays an ambush to cudgel a himself to a Prince who has seduced man who has offended him. A knot his sister, and accepts rank and wealth of gentlemen of high rank and influence as the price of her shame and his own. combine to push their fortunes at court He then repays by ingratitude the by circulating stories intended to ruin benefits which he has purchased by an innocent girl, stories which had no ignominy, betrays his patron in a manfoundation, and which, if they had been ner which the best cause cannot extrue, would never have passed the lips cuse, and commits an act, not only of of a man of honour. A dead child is private treachery, but of distinct milifound in the palace, the offspring of tary desertion. To his conduct at the some maid of honour by some courtier, crisis of the fate of James, no service or perhaps by Charles himself. The in modern times has, as far as we rewhole flight of pandars and buffoons member, furnished any parallel. The pounce upon it, and carry it in triumph conduct of Ney, scandalous enough no to the royal laboratory, where his Ma- doubt, is the very fastidiousness of

honour in comparison of it. The per- | Nothing was said about the wickedfidy of Arnold approaches it most ness of resistance till resistance had nearly. In our age and country no done its work, till the anointed vicetalents, no services, no party attach- gerent of Heaven had been driven ments, could bear any man up under away, and till it had become plain such mountains of infamy. Yet, even that he would never be restored, or before Churchill had performed those would be restored at least under strict great actions which in some degree limitations. The clergy went back, it redeem his character with posterity, must be owned, to their old theory, as the load lay very lightly on him. He soon as they found that it would do had others in abundance to keep him them no harm. in countenance. Godolphin, Orford, It is principally to the general base. Danby, the trimmer Halifax, the rene-ness and profligacy of the times that gade Sunderland, were all men of the Clarendon is indebted for his high resame class. putation. He was, in every respect, a Where such was the political mora- man unfit for his age, at once too good lity of the noble and the wealthy, it for it and too bad for it. He seemed may easily be conceived that those to be one of the ministers of Elizabeth, professions which, even in the best transplanted at once to a state of sotimes, are peculiarly liable to corrup-ciety widely different from that in tion, were in a frightful state. Such a which the abilities of such ministers bench and such a bar England has had been serviceable. In the sixteenth never seen. Jones, Scroggs, Jefferies, century, the Royal prerogative had North, Wright, Sawyer, Williams, are scarcely been called in question. A to this day the spots and blemishes of Minister who held it high was in no our legal chronicles. Differing in danger, so long as he used it well. constitution and in situation, whether That attachment to the Crown, that blustering or cringing, whether per- extreme jealousy of popular encroachsecuting Protestants or Catholics, they ments, that love, half religious half powere equally unprincipled and in-litical, for the Church, which, from the human. The part which the Church beginning of the second session of the played was not equally atrocious; but Long Parliament, showed itself in Clait must have been exquisitely divert-rendon, and which his sufferings, his ing to a scoffer. Never were principles long residence in France, and his high so loudly professed, and so shamelessly station in the government, served to abandoned. The Royal prerogative had been magnified to the skies in theological works. The doctrine of passive obedience had been preached from innumerable pulpits. The University of Oxford had sentenced the works of the most moderate constitutionalists to the flames. The accession of a Catholic King, the frightful cruelties committed in the west of England, never shook the steady loyalty of the clergy. But did they serve the King for nought? He laid his hand on them, and they cursed him to his face. He touched the revenue of a college and the liberty of some prelates; and the whole profession set up a yell worthy of Hugh Peters himself. Oxford sent her plate to an invader with more alacrity than she had shown when Charles the First requested it.

strengthen, would, a hundred years earlier, have secured to him the favour of his sovereign without rendering him odious to the people. His probity, his correctness in private life, his decency of deportment, and his general ability, would not have misbecome a colleague of Walsingham and Burleigh. But, in the times on which he was cast, his errors and his virtues were alike out of place. He imprisoned men without trial. He was accused of raising unlawful contributions on the people for the support of the army. The abo lition of the act which ensured the frequent holding of Parliaments was one of his favourite objects. He seems to have meditated the revival of the Star Chamber and the High Commission Court. His zeal for the prerogative made him unpopular; but it

both by the Court and by the Opposition.

sould not secure to him the favour of a master far more desirous of ease and pleasure than of power. Charles would rather have lived in exile and privacy, with abundance of money, a crowd of mimics to amuse him, and a score of mistresses, than have purchased the absolute dominion of the world by the privations and exertions to which Clarendon was constantly urging him. A councillor who was always bringing him papers and giving him advice, and who stoutly refused to compliment Lady Castlemaine and to carry messages to Mistress Stewart, soon became more hateful to him than ever Cromwell had been. Thus, considered by the people as an oppressor, by the Court as a censor, the Minister fell from his high office with a ruin more violent and destructive than could ever have been his fate, if he had either respected the principles of the Constitution or flat-tertains towards those domestic foes tered the vices of the King.

These pecuniary transactions are commonly considered as the most disgraceful part of the history of those times; and they were no doubt highly reprehensible. Yet, in justice to the Whigs and to Charles himself, we must admit that they were not so shameful or atrocious as at the present day they appear. The effect of violent animosities between parties has always been an indifference to the general welfare and honour of the State. A politician, where factions run high, is interested not for the whole people, but for his own section of it. The rest are, in his view, strangers, enemies, or rather pirates. The strongest aversion which he can feel to any foreign power is the ardour of friendship, when compared with the loathing which he en

with whom he is cooped up in a narrow Mr. Hallam has formed, we think, a space, with whom he lives in a constant most correct estimate of the character interchange of petty injuries and inand administration of Clarendon. But sults, and from whom, in the day of he scarcely makes a sufficient allow- their success, he has to expect seveance for the wear and tear which ho- rities far beyond any that a conqueror nesty almost necessarily sustains in the from a distant country would inflict. friction of political life, and which, in Thus, in Greece, it was a point of hotimes so rough as those through which nour for a man to cleave to his party Clarendon passed, must be very con- against his country. No aristocratical siderable. When these are fairly esti- citizen of Samos or Corcyra would have mated, we think that his integrity may hesitated to call in the aid of Lacebe allowed to pass muster. A high- dæmon. The multitude, on the conminded man he certainly was not, trary, looked every where to Athens. either in public or in private affairs. In the Italian states of the thirteenth His own account of his conduct in the and fourteenth centuries, from the same affair of his daughter is the most ex-cause, no man was so much a Pisan or traordinary passage in autobiography. a Florentine as a Ghibeline or a Guelf. We except nothing even in the Confessions of Rousseau. Several writers have taken a perverted and absurd pride in representing themselves as detestable; but no other ever laboured hard to make himself despicable and ridiculous. In one important parti-viding almost every European country cular Clarendon showed as little regard to the honour of his country as he had shown to that of his family. He accepted a subsidy from France for the relief of Portugal. But this method of obtaining money was afterwards practised to a much greater extent and for objects much less respectable,

It may be doubted whether there was a single individual who would have scrupled to raise his party from a state of depression, by opening the gates of his native city to a French or an Arragonese force. The Reformation, di

into two parts, produced similar effects. The Catholic was too strong for the Englishman, the Huguenot for the Frenchman. The Protestant statesmen of Scotland and France called in the aid of Elizabeth; and the Papists of the League brought a Spanish army into the very heart of France. The

commotions to which the French Re- | from the foreign powers favourable to volution gave rise were followed by the Pretender. the same consequences. The Repub- Never was there less of national licans in every part of Europe were feeling among the higher orders than eager to see the armies of the National during the reign of Charles the Second. Convention and the Directory appear That Prince, on the one side, thought among them, and exulted in defeats it better to be the deputy of an absowhich distressed and humbled those lute king than the King of a free whom they considered as their worst enemies, their own rulers. The princes and nobles of France, on the other hand, did their utmost to bring foreign invaders to Paris. A very short time has elapsed since the Apostolical party in Spain invoked, too successfully, the support of strangers.