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WHIGS AND TORIES AGREE

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the House of Hanover, of the other to that of Stuart, induced both to talk a language much more favourable to popular rights than to monarchical power. What took place at the first representation of Cato is no bad illustration of the way in which the two great sections of the community almost invariably acted. A play, the whole merit of which consists in its stately rhetoric sometimes not unworthy of Lucan, about hating tyrants and dying for freedom, is brought on the stage in a time of great political excitement. Both parties crowd to the theatre. Each affects to consider every line as a compliment to itself, and an attack on its opponents. The curtain falls amidst an unanimous roar of applause. The Whigs of the Kit Cat embrace the author, and assure him that he has rendered an inestimable service to liberty. The Tory secretary of state presents a purse to the chief actor for defending the cause of liberty so well. The history of that night was, in miniature, the history of two generations.

We well know how much sophistry there was in the reasonings, and how much exaggeration in the declamations of both parties. But when we compare the state in which political science was at the close of the reign of George the Second with the state in which it had been when James the Second came to the throne, it is impossible not to admit that a prodigious improvement had taken place. We are no admirers of the political doctrines laid down in Blackstone's Commentaries. But if we consider that those Commentaries were read with great applause in the very schools where, seventy or eighty years before, books had been publicly burned by order of the University of Oxford for containing the damnable doctrine that the English monarchy is limited and mixed, we cannot deny that a salutary change had

taken place. The Jesuits,' says Pascal, in the last of his incomparable letters, have obtained a Papal decree, condemning Galileo's doctrine about the motion of the earth. It is all in vain. If the world is really turning round, all mankind together will not be able to keep it from turning, or to keep themselves from turning with it.' The decrees of Oxford were as ineffectual to stay the great moral and political revolution as those of the Vatican to stay the motion of our globe. That learned University found itself not only unable to keep the mass from moving, but unable to keep itself from moving along with the mass. Nor was the effect of the discussions and speculations of that period confined to our own country. While the Jacobite party was in the last dotage and weakness of its paralytic old age, the political philosophy of England began to produce a mighty effect on France, and, through France, on Europe.

Here another vast field opens itself before us. But we must resolutely turn away from it. We will conclude by advising all our readers to study Sir James Mackintosh's valuable Fragment, and by expressing our hope that they will soon be able to study it without those accompaniments which have hitherto impeded its circulation.

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The present edition of 'MACAULAY'S ESSAYS' (in five volumes, of which this is the second) has been prepared for publication by Mr. A. J. GRIEVE, B.A., Registrar of the University of Madras, who has followed the text of the revised collected edition of 1851. The usual marginalia have been dispensed with, but the reader may find them to some extent replaced by the right-hand page-headings.

August 15, 1900.

I. G.

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"I still think that on any subject which Macaulay has touched, his survey is unsurpassable for giving a first bird's-eye view, and for creating interest in the matter... And he certainly has not his equal any where for covering his subject in the pointing-stick fashion. You need not-you had much better notpin your faith on his details, but his Pisgah sights are admirable. Hole after hole has been picked in the "Clive" and the "Hastings," the "Johnson" and the "Addison," the "Frederick" and the "Horace Walpole," yet every one of these papers contains sketches, summaries, précis, which have not been made obsolete or valueless by all the work of correction in detail.'-Professor SAINTSBURY (Corrected Impressions, p. 89 f.).

EDITOR'S APPENDIX

The portrait of Hampden prefixed to this volume has been reproduced from Posselwhite's engraving of the print by J. Houbraken (1740).

Chief Dates in Macaulay's Life

1800 (Oct. 25). Birth at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire.

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1818-1825.

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1859 (Dec. 28).

Life at Cambridge (Fellow of Trinity, 1824).
Essay on Milton contributed to "Edinburgh
Review.'

Joined the Northern Circuit.

M.P. for Calne (gift of the Marquis of Lansdowne).

M.P. for Leeds.

Legal Adviser to the Supreme Council of
India. Work at the Indian Penal Code.
M.P. for Edinburgh, and Secretary at War in
Melbourne's Cabinet.

Lays of Ancient Rome.

Collected edition of the Essays.

Rejected at the Election of M.P. for Edinburgh.
History of England from the Accession of James II.
vols. i. and ii.

M.P. for Edinburgh; serious illness.
History of England, vols. iii. and iv.

Raised to the peerage.

Death at Holly Lodge, Kensington. (Buried in Westminster Abbey, 9th January 1860.)

Books of Reference

Sir G. O. Trevelyan: The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (2 vols. 8vo. 1876, 2nd ed. with additions, 1877, subsequent editions 1878 and 1881).

J. Cotter Morison : Macaulay [English Men of Letters], (1882). An invaluable handbook.

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