danced the round of gaiety amidst the | that of this remarkable man! To be murmurs of envy and the gratulations regarded in his own age as a classic, of applause, had been attended from and in ours as a companion. To re pleasure to pleasure by the great, the ceive from his contemporaries that full sprightly, and the vain, and had seen homage which men of genius have in her regard solicited by the obsequious- general received only from posterity! ness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and To be more intimately known to posthe timidity of love." Surely Sir John terity than other men are known to Falstaff himself did not wear his petti- their contemporaries! That kind of coats with a worse grace. The reader fame which is commonly the most tran may well cry out, with honest Sir sient is, in his case, the most durable. Hugh Evans, "I like not when a 'oman The reputation of those writings, which has a great peard: I spy a great peard he probably expected to be immortal, under her muffler."* is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe. JOHN HAMPDEN. Some Memorials of John Hampden, his We had something more to say. But our article is already too long; and we must close it. We would fain part in good humour from the hero, from the biographer, and even from the editor, who, ill as he has performed his task, has at least this claim to our gratitude, that he has induced us to read Boswell's book again. As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever on the canvass of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of WE have read this book with great Burke and the tall thin form of Lang-pleasure, though not exactly with that ton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and the "What then, sir ?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don't see your way through the question, sir!" What a singular destiny has been It is proper to observe that this passage bears a very close resemblance to a passage in the Rambler (No. 20.). The resemblance may possibly be the effect of unconscious plagiarism. kind of pleasure which we had expected. We had hoped that Lord Nugent would have been able to collect, from family papers and local traditions, much new and interesting information respecting the life and character of the renowned leader of the Long Parliament, the first of those great English commoners whose plain addition of Mister has, to our ears, a more majestic sound than the proudest of the feudal titles. In this hope we have been disappointed; but assuredly not from any want of zeal or diligence on the part of the noble biographer. Even at Hampden, there are, it seems, no important papers relating to the most illustrious proprictor of that ancient domain. The most valuable memorials of him which still exist, belong to the family of his friend Sir John Eliot. Lord Eliot has furnished the portrait which is engraved for this work, together with some very interesting letters. The portrait is undoubtedly an original, and probably the only original now in existence. The lic service, perilous, arduous, delicate, was required; and to every service the intellect and the courage of this wonderful man were found fully equal. He became a debater of the first order, a most dexterous manager of the House of Commons, a negotiator, a soldier He governed a fierce and turbulent as intellectual forcheɛd, the mild penetra- | across the path of tyranny. The times tion of the eye, and the inflexible reso- grew darker and more troubled. Publution expressed by the lines of the mouth, sufficiently guarantee the likeness. We shall probably make some extracts from the letters. They contain almost all the new information that Lord Nugent has been able to procure respecting the private pursuits of the great man whose memory he worships with an enthusiastic, but not ex-sembly, abounding in able men, as travagant veneration. The public life of Hampden is surrounded by no obscurity. His history, more particularly from the year 1640 to his death, is the history of England. These Memoirs must be considered as Memoirs of the history of England; and, as such, they well deserve to be attentively perused. They contain some curious facts which, to us at least, are new, much spirited narrative, many judicious remarks, and much eloquent declamation. easily as he had governed his family. He showed himself as competent to direct a campaign as to conduct the basiness of the petty sessions. We can scarcely express the admiration which we feel for a mind so great, and, at the same time, so healthful and so well proportioned, so willingly contracting itself to the humblest duties, so easily expanding itself to the highest, so contented in repose, so powerful in action. Almost every part of this virtuous and blameless life which is not hidden from We are not sure that even the want of us in modest privacy is a precious and information respecting the private cha- splendid portion of our national history. racter of Hampden is not in itself a cir- Had the private conduct of Hampden cumstance as strikingly characteristic as afforded the slightest pretence for cenany which the most minute chronicler, sure, he would have been assailed by O'Meara, Mrs. Thrale, or Boswell him- the same blind malevolence which, in self, ever recorded concerning their he- | defiance of the clearest proofs, still rocs. The celebrated Puritan leader is an continues to call Sir John Eliot an almost solitary instance of a great man assassin. Had there been even any who neither sought nor shunned great-weak part in the character of Hampness, who found glory only because glory den, had his manners been in any relay in the plain path of duty. During spect open to ridicule, we may be sure more than forty years he was known that no mercy would have been shown to his country neighbours as a gentle- to him by the writers of Charles's facman of cultivated mind, of high prin- tion. Those writers have carefully preciples, of polished address, happy in his served every little circumstance which family, and active in the discharge of could tend to make their opponents local duties; and to political men as odious or contemptible. They have an honest, industrious, and sensible made themselves merry with the cant member of Parliament, not eager to of injudicious zealots. They have told display his talents, stanch to his party, us that Pym broke down in a speech, and attentive to the interests of his that Ireton had his nose pulled by constituents. A great and terrible crisis Hollis, that the Earl of Northumbercame. A direct attack was made by land cudgelled Henry Marten, that St. an arbitrary government on a sacred John's manners were sullen, that Vane right of Englishmen, on a right which had an ugly face, that Cromwell had a was the chief security for all their other red nose. But neither the artful Clarights. The nation looked round for a rendon nor the scurrilous Denham defender. Calmly and unostentatiously could venture to throw the slightest the plain Buckinghamshire Esquire imputation on the morals or the manplaced himself at the head of his coun-ners of Ilampden. What was the trymen, and right before the face and opinion entertained respecting him by His son, William Hampden, sate in the Parliament which that Queen summoned in the year 1593. William married Elizabeth Cromwell, aunt of the celebrated man who afterwards He was born in 1594. In 1597 his father died, and left him heir to a very large estate. After passing some years at the grammar school of Thame, young Hampden was sent, at fifteen, to Magdalene College, in the University of Oxford. At nineteen, he was admitted a student of the Inner Temple, where he made himself master of the principles of the English law. In 1619, he married Elizabeth Symeon, a lady to whom he appears to have been fondly attached. In the following year he was returned to parliament by a borough which has in our time obtained a miserable celebrity, the borough of Grampound. the best men of his time we learn from Baxter. That eminent person, eminent not only for his piety and his fervid devotional eloquence, but for his moderation, his knowledge of political affairs, and his skill in judging of cha-governed the British islands with more racters, declared in the Saint's Rest, than regal power; and from this marthat one of the pleasures which he riage sprang John Hampden. hoped to enjoy in heaven was the society of Hampden. In the editions printed after the Restoration, the name of Hampden was omitted. But I must tell the reader," says Baxter, "that I did blot it out, not as changing my opinion of the person. Mr. John Hampden was one that friends and enemies acknowledged to be most eminent for pruuence, piety, and peaceable counsels, having the most universal praise of any gentleman that I remember of that age. I remember a moderate, prudent, aged gentleman, far from him, but acquainted with him, whom I have heard saying, that if he might choose what person he would be then in the world, he would be John Hampden." We cannot but regret that we have not fuller memorials of a man who, after passing through the most severe temptations by which human virtue can be tried, after acting a most conspicuous part in a revolution and a civil war, could yet deserve such praise as this from such authority. Yet the want of memorials is surely the best proof that hatred itself could find no blemish on his memory. Of his private life during his early years little is known beyond what Clarendon has told us. "In his entrance into the world," says that great historian, “he indulged himself in all the license in sports, and exercises, and company, which were used by men of the most jolly conversation." A remarkable change, however, passed on his character. "On a sudden," says Clarendon, "from a life of great pleasure and license, he retired to extraordinary sobriety and strictness, to a more reserved and melancholy society." It is probable that this change took place when Hampden was about twenty-five years old. At that age he was united to a woman whom he loved and esteemed. At that age he entered into political life. A mind so happily constituted as his would naturally, under such circumstances, relinquish the pleasures of dissipation for domestic enjoyments and public duties. The story of his early life is soon told. He was the head of a family which had been settled in Buckinghamshire before the Conquest. Part of the estate which he inherited had been bestowed by Edward the Confessor on Baldwyn de Hampden, whose name seems to indicate that he was one of the Norman favourites of the last Saxon king. During the contest between the houses of York and Lancaster, the Hampdens adhered to the party of the Red Rose, His enemics have allowed that he and were, consequently, persecuted by was a man in whom virtue showed Edward the Fourth, and favoured by itself in its mildest and least austere Henry the Seventh. Under the Tudors, form. With the morals of a Puritan, the family was great and flourishing. he had the manners of an accomplished Griffith Hampden, high sheriff of Buck-courtier. Even after the change in inghamshire, entertained Elizabeth his habits," he preserved,” says Clarenwith greet magnificence at his seat, don, "his own natural cheerfulness and vivacity, and, above all, a flowing | posed to endure oppression. "C'est le courtesy to all men." These qualities plus périlleux peuple qui soit au monde, distinguished him from most of the et plus outrageux et orgueilleux." The members of his sect and his party, and, good canon probably did not perceive in the great crisis in which he after- that all the prosperity and internal wards took a principal part, were of peace which this dangerous people enscarcely less service to the country joyed were the fruits of the spirit which than his keen sagacity and his daunt- he designates as proud and outrageous. less courage. He has, however, borne ample testimony to the effect, though he was not sagacious enough to trace it to its cause. "En le royaume d'Angleterre," says he, "toutes gens, labourcurs et marchands, ont appris de vivre en paix, et à mener leurs marchandises paisiblement, et les laboureurs labourer." In the fifteenth century, though England was convulsed by the struggle between the two branches of the royal family, the physical and moral condition of the people continued to improve. Villenage almost wholly disappeared. The calamities of war were little felt, except by those who bore arms. The oppressions of the government were little felt, except by the aristocracy. The institutions of the country, when compared with the institutions of the neighbouring kingdoms, seem to have been not un In January, 1621, Hampden took his scat in the House of Commons. His mother was exceedingly desirous that her son should obtain a peerage. His family, his possessions, and his personal accomplishments were such, as would, in any age, have justified him in pretending to that honour. But in the reign of James the First there was one short cut to the House of Lords. It was but to ask, to pay, and to have. The sale of titles was carried on as openly as the sale of boroughs in our times. Hampden turned away with contempt from the degrading honours with which his family desired to see him invested, and attached himself to the party which was in opposition to the court. The government of Edward the Fourth, though we call it cruel and arbitrary, was humane and liberal when compared with that of Lewis the Eleventh, or that of Charles the Bold. Comines, who had lived amidst the wealthy cities of Flanders, and who had visited Florence and Venice, had never seen a people so well governed as the English. "Or selon mon advis," says he, "entre toutes les seigneuries du monde, dont j'ay connoissance, ou la chose publique est mieulx traitée, et ou regne moins de violence sur le peuple, et ou il n'y a nuls édifices abbatus ny demolis pour guerre, c'est Angleterre; et tombe le sort et le malheur sur ceulx qui font la guerre." It was about this time, as Lord Nugent has justly remarked, that par-deserving of the praises of Fortescue. liamentary opposition began to take a regular form. From a very early age, the English had enjoyed a far larger share of liberty than had fallen to the lot of any neighbouring people. How it chanced that a country conquered and enslaved by invaders, a country of which the soil had been portioned out among foreign adventurers and of which the laws were written in a foreign tongue, a country given over to that worst tyranny, the tyranny of caste over caste, should have become the seat of civil liberty, the object of the admiration and envy of surrounding states, is one of the most obscure problems in the philosophy of history. But the fact is certain. Within a century and a half after the Norman conquest, the Great Charter was conceded. Within two centuries after the Conquest, the first House of Commons met. Froissart tells us, what indeed his whole narrative sufficiently proves, that of all the nations of the fourteenth century, the English were the least dis About the close of the fifteenth and the commencement of the sixteenth century, a great portion of the influence which the aristocracy had possessed passed to the crown. No English king has ever enjoyed such absolute power as Henry the Eighth. But while the royal prerogatives were acquiring strength at the expense of the nobility, | private judgment at the pleasure of rulers who could vindicate their own proceedings only by asserting the liberty of private judgment, these things could not long be borne. Those who not long continue to persecute for the surplice. It required no great sagacity to perceive the inconsistency and dishonesty of men who, dissenting from almost all Christendom, would suffer none to dissent from themselves, who demanded freedom of conscience, yet refused to grant it, who execrated persecution, yet persecuted, who urged reason against the authority of one opponent, and authority against the reasons of another. Bonner acted at least in accordance with his own principles. Cranmer could vindicate himself from the charge of being a heretic only by arguments which made him out to be a murderer. Thus the system on which the Eng clesiastical affairs for some time after the Reformation was a system too obviously unreasonable to be lasting. The public mind moved while the go two great revolutions took place, destined to be the parents of many revolutions, the invention of Printing, and the reformation of the Church. The immediate effect of the Reform-had pulled down the crucifix could ation in England was by no means favourable to political liberty. The authority which had been exercised by the Popes was transferred almost entire to the King. Two formidable powers which had often served to check each other were united in a single despot. If the system on which the founders of the Church of England acted could have been permanent, the Reformation would have been, in a political sense, the greatest curse that ever fell on our country. But that system carried within it the seeds of its own death. It was possible to transfer the name of Head of the Church from Clement to Henry; but it was impossible to transfer to the new establishment the veneration which the old establishment had in-lish Princes acted with respect to ecspired. Mankind had not broken one yoke in pieces only in order to put on another. The supremacy of the Bishop of Rome had been for ages considered as a fundamental principle of Christi-vernment moved, but would not stop anity. It had for it every thing that could make a prejudice deep and strong, venerable antiquity, high authority, general consent. It had been taught in the first lessons of the nurse. It was taken for granted in all the exhortations of the priest. To remove it was to break innumerable associations, and to give a great and perilous shock to the principles. Yet this prejudice, strong as it was, could not stand in the great day of the deliverance of the human reason. And it was not to be expected that the public mind, just after freeing itself by an unexampled effort, from a bondage which it had endured for ages, would patiently submit to a tyranny which could plead no ancient title. Rome had at least prescription on its side. But Protestant intolerance, despotism in an upstart sect, infallibility claimed by guides who acknowledged that they had passed the greater part of their lives in error, restraints imposed on the liberty of where the government stopped. The same impulse which had carried millions away from the Church of Rome continued to carry them forward in the same direction. As Catholics had become Protestants, Protestants became Puritans; and the Tudors and Stuarts were as unable to avert the latter change as the Popes had been to avert the former. The dissenting party increased and became strong under every kind of discouragement and oppression. They were a sect. The government persecuted them; and they became an opposition. The old constitution of England furnished to them the means of resisting the sovereign without breaking the law. They were the majority of the House of Commons. They had the power of giving or withholding supplies; and, by a judicious exercise of this power, they might hope to take from the Church its usurped authority over the consciences of men, and from the Crown some part of the |