vres. law for a term of years of the expenditure statecraft of our fathers, on the faith that by which our defences are to be maintained. culture and science, and mutual intercommuWe should hail such a measure as an augurynication, had made wars among civilised naof a better state of things. It would give to tions an impossibility. The year 1870 has us some sort of security that the safety of taught us what pitiful presumption lay bethis country shall no longer be at the mercy hind the mask of this grand philosophy. of the financial combinations of each succeed- We know now that war has lost none of its ing year-that it shall not be liable to be congeniality to human errors and passionsparalysed by any passing caprice of the that the science which was to have stayed it House of Commons. But if such a law is at has but sharpened its weapons and multipresent too much to hope for, at least we plied its horrors-and that, whereas of old may look for some understanding between it was undertaken with small pretext and the chiefs of the two great political parties paltry result, the pretexts remain now as to the effect, that the amount of the military scanty as ever, but the result is overwhelmEstimates shall not for a fixed term of years ing desolation. We know that no appearance be made the object of Parliamentary manoeu- of peace, however profound, however soothing, is to be trusted. The tempest can burst We confess to a fear that our rulers may upon us in a moment from a blue sky, wastnot realise the gravity of the crisis, and may ing smiling territories and happy populations fritter away the interval of preparation that yet with the utmost misery that human nature can remains to us in attempts to patch again the endure. All this is now placed beyond the patchwork of which our military system con- reach of speculative objection. It is bare, sists. A few changes in detail, a little extra stern fact. We live in an age of 'blood and expenditure for the year upon this vote or iron.' If we mean to escape misery and disthat, will justify them to themselves in as- honour, such as that of which we are readsuring us that we are secure against all emer- ing every day, we must trust to no congencies. It was precisely the same assu-sciousness of a righteous cause, to no moral rance which the Emperor of the French gave to his Chambers in the spring of 1869. But whatever Ministers, grown old in the art of substituting grandiloquent phrases for solid precautions, may assert, the nation at least cannot be deceived. The great lesson of this war-its one compensation for its unnumbered horrors-is that we must drive out from us the prophets of optimism. For years they have sung to us premature pæans on the progress of humanity; and so confident was their triumph, so overwhelming their contempt for those who still dared to believe that the human race was fallen, that men had come in some degree to listen to them. The new gospel-a compound of commerce and philosophy-was being extensively taught and believed, to the effect that the peace on earth,' which Christianity had been unable to bring about, had been secured by the locomotive and the spinningjenny. We were to lay aside our precautions, and to bury with little honour the influence, to no fancied restraints of civilisation. These bulwarks may be of use to us when the millennium draws near; they are empty verbiage now. We must trust to our own power of self-defence, and to no other earthly aid. Nor let us hope that we can provide the safeguard when the danger comes. We have been taught by the saddest lessons of our neighbour's experiences, that to trust in untrained valour and selfdevotion, however lofty those qualities may be, is the silliest of delusions. If we would be safe, we must call to our aid all the resources that science and discipline have ministered to the art of human destruction. We know now, by experiments worked out upon others, that a large, well-trained, wellsupplied army, is the one condition of national safety. It will be well for us if we suffer no official procrastination, no empty commonplaces about British valour, to leave us to face the coming danger undefendedunprepared. THE LONDON QUARTERLY REVIEW. NO. CCLX. FOR APRIL, 1871. ART. I.-A Life of Anthony Ashley, First | judge, and all of them together ought not to Earl of Shaftesbury, 1621-1683. By preclude renewed inquiry or appeal, if it can W. D. Christie, Formerly Her Majesty's be shown that they were swayed by prejuMinister to the Argentine Confederation dice or imperfectly acquainted with the facts. and to Brazil. 2 vols. London and New In the full and complete Life before us, Mr. York, 1871. Christie has undertaken to show this: to prove that historians, poets, and lawyers, are equally at fault: that Shaftesbury was not a bad man, if an erring one: that his admitted faults and vices were less those of the individual than of the age: that he lived in times when, to persist in an uncompromising course, was as impracticable as to walk straight amongst pitfalls or to keep clear of sunken rocks without tacking: that, whenever he joined or left a party or a cause, he did so because it had assumed fresh colours, or because a more effective mode of promoting the essential object of good government had broken upon him. THERE are few characters in English history better worth studying than that of Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury. He lived in most momentous times, and he played most important parts in them. He was a Royalist and a Parliamentarian by turns during the Great Rebellion; a kind of half-Cromwellian, with monarchical leanings, under the Commonwealth; a courtier, a patriot, a member of the Cabal, and a fierce exclusionist, under the Restoration. He changed sides with an audacity, a rapidity, and an adroitness, that make it difficult, almost impossible, to decide whether he was corrupt or incorrupt, whether he acted upon principle or no-principle, whether he adopted expediency, broad enlightened expediency, for the rule of his public conduct, or, in each successive crisis, simply waited for the tide, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. If his changes had uniformly, or even generally, coincided with his interests or supposed views of personal advancement, there would be little room for doubt; but they did not. Making no allowance for him on this score, historians, poets, and lawyers, have joined in a chorus of reprobation. The brilliant rhetoric of Macaulay, the splendid satire of Dryden, the inexhaustible wit of Butler, the forensic acuteness of Lord Campbell, have been combined against his fame; yet no one of these formidable assailants can be deemed unexceptionable as a witness or a The undertaking was one of no ordinary boldness, and Mr. Christie is no ordinary biographer. Acute, cultivated, zealous, industrious, scrupulously accurate, justly confident in his resources and his views, he possesses (what we recently commended in Sir Henry Bulwer) the marked advantage of a peculiar training for his task. He has held high appointments in the diplomatic service, and he was an active member of the House of Commons for some years. In suggesting that biographers of statesmen will always be the better for some practical acquaintance with public affairs or statesmanship, we are not afraid of incurring the satirical reproof implied in the well-known line 'Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.' Shaftesbury himself foresaw that he would. be hardly judged by posterity. Whoever considers the number and the power of the Clarendon has recorded that many of the great men who took part in the Civil War were little men. An accurate notion of Shaftesbury's bodily proportions is conveyed by Dryden's nervous couplet: 'A fiery soul, which working out its way, He took after his mother and maternal adversaries I have met with, and how stu- | baronet, lord of the manor and place where diously they have, under the authority of I was born; my father, Sir John Cooper, both Church and State, dispersed the most knight and baronet, son of Sir John Cooper, villanous slanders of me, will think it neces- of Rockborn in the county of Hamshyre. I sary that I in this follow the French fashion, was christened by the name of Anthony and write my own Memoirs, that it may ap- Ashley, for, notwithstanding my grandfather pear to the world on what ground or motives had articled with my father and his guardians they came to be my enemies, and with what that he should change his name to Ashley, truth and justice they have prosecuted their yet, to make all sure in the eldest, he requarrel; and if in this whole narration they solved to add his name, so that it should not find me false or partial in any particular, I be parted with.' give up the whole to whatever censure they will make.' Such is the commencement of a meditated autobiography, which breaks off abruptly at the most interesting point; just when my life is not without great mixtures of the public concern, and must be much intermingled with the history of the times.' This fragment, however, is valuable as an illustration of the period and the writer. In describing or (to use his own expression) 'setting down his youthful time-including the particulars of his birth, family, and education-he incidentally throws light on national manners; whilst his sketches of contemporaries are remarkable for fineness of perception, firmness of touch, rich racy expression, and vitality. One of them, that of Mr. Hastings, 'son, brother, and uncle to the Earls of Huntingdon,' (often reprinted) has won a place in popular literature by these qualities. There is another autobiographical fragment, which skims over parts of his early life in a more cursory fashion; there is also extant a Diary for four years and a half of his middle life; but little more than bare well-known facts are to be collected from these documents; which occupy less time than thirty pages of Mr. Christie's Appendix, and afford little aid when we come to the vexed questions or debateable ground. It is just possible that, on approaching this same ground, Shaftesbury paused and thought better of it, or that the maxim, attributed to an eighteenth-century diarist, occurred to him: Whenever you have made a good impression, go away.' The Fragments leave a decidedly favourable impression, which their completion or continuation might have dis 6 grandfather in these respects. Sir Anthony Ashley was of great age, but of strong sense and health; he had been for wisdom, courage, experience, skill in weapon, agility, and strength of body scarce paralleled in his age, of a large mind in all his actions, his person of the lowest. His daughter was of the same stature, a modest and virtuous woman, of a weaker mould, and not so stirring a mind as her father. Sir John Cooper was very lovely and graceful both in face and person, of a moderate stature, neither too high nor too low, of an easy and an affable nature, fair and just in all affairs.' Sir Anthony Ashley, when nearly fourscore, had taken to wife a young lady under twenty, near of kin to the Duke of Buckingham, from whom he expected great preferment, and, from her, children; but he failed of his expectation in the first, and his age, with the virtue of the young lady, could not help him to the latter.' He accordingly settled all his fortune on his son-in-law and daughter for their lives, with remainder in fee to Shaftesbury, 'for he grew every day more and more fond of me, being a prating boy and very observant of him.' Sir Anthony died in 1627, and Lady Cooper (the mother) in 1628, whereupon Sir John Cooper (the father) took for 'My birth (he states) was at Wimborn St. his second wife the widow of Sir Charles Gyles in the County of Dorsett, on the 22nd Moryson, and daughter and coheir of the day of July, 1621, early in the morning; my Lord Viscount Camden, a lady beautiful parents on both sides of a noble stock, being and of great fortune, a discreet woman of a of the first rank of gentry in those countries large soul, who, if she had not given some' where they lived.' It appears from this and jealousy to both her husbands, and confirmother passages that the term 'noble' was thened it afterwards by marrying the person used in England, as it is still used on the Continent, to designate merely ancient lineage or good birth. My mother's name (he continues) was Anne, the sole daughter and heir of Sir Anthony Ashley, knight and turbed. (Sir Richard Alford), mought (sic) have been numbered amongst the excellent.' This marriage caused the removal of the family to Cashiobury, the jointure house of the lady, where Sir John died, in March, 1630, Shaftesbury being thus left an orphan in his ninth year. Up to this time, and for about a year afterwards, he had been under the instruction of one Mr. Guerden, who subsequently became a physician of note. Mr. Guerden's successor in this charge was Mr. Fletcher, a very excellent teacher of grammar; and this is all we know of Shaftesbury's education till he went to Exeter College, Oxford, in 1637. sitting with his hat over his eyes, and having more.' It is the remark of Gibbon that every man who rises above the common level has reWithout going quite the length of the ceived two educations: the first from his Reverend Mr. Thwackum in the doctrine of teachers; the second, more personal and im- judgments, we call on all wicked uncles to portant, from himself. Shaftesbury may be take warning from this catastrophe. Shaftes cited in confirmation of this theory, and he bury's career at the University was no less is also a striking instance of the precocity typical of the coming man than that of Nawhich occurs, or at all events is made poleon making snowball ramparts and directminent, so much more frequently in preceding mimic sieges at Brienne. We see the ing generations than in our own. This is restless, scheming, turbulent politician as pre-eminently the age of septuagenarian, al-clearly as the nascent strategist in the bud. The mode in which he set about obtaining most octogenarian, statesmen and generals; but we can no longer boast of youthful influence, and the uses he made of it, are orators, ministers, heroes, and conquerors, equally characteristic. like Fox, Pitt, Condé, and Napoleon; nor of men of mark marrying, settling, and taking up a distinguished position, public or private, in their teens. Shaftesbury was under eighteen when he married, under nineteen when he took his seat in the House of Commons, and hardly thirteen when he intervened personally in the management of his property, sadly mismanaged by his guardians, and succeeded in wresting a large slice from the grasp of an uncle who had hoped to plunder him through the connivance of the Court of Wards. This uncle, Sir Francis Ashley, was a formidable antagonist, being the King's serjeant-at-law, and one of more elocution, learning, and abilitie, than gratitude or piety to his elder brother's family.' The main point in question was whether a deed of settlement took the estate out of wardship: 'I kept both horses and servants in Oxford, and was allowed what expense or recreation İ desired, which liberty I never much abused; but it gave me the opportunity of obliging by entertainments the better sort and supporting divers of the activest of the lower rank with giving them leave to eat when in distress upon my expense, it being no small honour amongst those sort of men, that my name in the buttery book willingly owned twice the expense of any in the University. This expense, my quality, proficiency in learning, and natural affability easily not only obtained the good will of the wiser and older sort, but made me the leader even of all the rough young men of that college (Exeter), famous for the courage and shire gentlemen, which in great numbers yearly strength of tall, raw-boned Cornish and Devoncome to that college, and did then maintain in the schools coursing against Christ Church, the largest and most numerous college in the University.' 'Mr. Noy was then the King's Attorney, This coursing, he goes on to explain, was who, being a very intimate friend of my grand in olden times intended for a fair trial of father's, had drawn that settlement; my friends learning and skill in logic, metaphysics, and advised that I was in great danger if he would school divinity, but for some generations the not undertake my cause, and yet, it being verbal disputations had uniformly ended in against the King, it was neither proper nor pro- affronts, confusion, and very often blows, bable he would meddle in it for me; but weigh-when they went most gravely to work,' ing the temper of the man, the kindness he had for my grandfather, and his honour so concerned if a deed of that consequence should fail of his drawing, they advised that I must be my own solicitor, and carry the deed myself alone to him, which, being but thirteen years old, I undertook and performed with that pertness that he told me he would defend my cause though he lost his place. I was at the Court, and he made good his word to the full without taking one penny fees. My Lord Cottington was then Master of the Wards, who, making a great noise with their feet, hissing and shoving with their shoulders, the stronger driving out the weaker, the proctors and occasionally the Vice-Chancellor being swept away with the throng. 'I was often one of the disputants, and gave the sign and order for their beginning, but, being not strong of body, was always guarded from violence by two or three of the sturdiest youths, as their chief, and one who always re |