Henry Hallam (1777-1859), son of the Dean of Wells, was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple. He was early appointed a Commissioner of Stamps, a well-paid office which, with his private means, secured him a sufficient income and allowed him to withdraw from legal practice and prosecute those studies on which his fame rests. 'Classic Hallam, much renowned for Greek,' as Byron called him, was an early and important contributor to the Edinburgh Review. His View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818), a series of dissertations on European history from the fifth to the end of the fifteenth century, at once gave him a front rank amongst English historians, and procured for him the honours of D.C.L. and F.R.S. In 1827 he published The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of George II.; and in 1837-38 an Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries. With vast stores of knowledge and indefatigable application, Hallam possessed a clear and independent judgment, and a style grave and impressive, though somewhat lacking in vivacity, colour, warmth, and sympathy. His Introduction to the Literature of Europe is a great monument of his erudition, though it is impossible for any man to be infallible on such a wide field; and his judgments on literature were less original and less permanently valuable than his epoch-making work in constitutional history. He insisted on the necessity of studying the original sources of history, and helped to found an English historical school. His works must still be consulted by the student, though they can hardly be popular with the general reader. His views of political questions were those generally adopted by the Whig party; but though stated with calmness and moderation, they provoked Southey and all Tories and HighChurchmen to wrath, and, on the other hand, secured Macaulay's enthusiastic laudation. He was peculiarly a supporter of principles, not of men, and was eminently judicial and judicious in his estimates, though somewhat insular in his sympathies and outlook. In the Literature of Europe, though there too we seem to deal with shades rather than with living men of like passions with ourselves, there is at times something more of feeling and imagination, a more sympathetic tone, than could have been anticipated from the calm, unimpassioned tenor of Hallam's historic style. Hallam, like Burke, in his latter years 'lived in an inverted order they who ought to have succeeded him had gone before him; they who should have been to him as posterity were in the place of ancestors.' His eldest son, Arthur Henry Hallam--the subject of Tennyson's In Memoriam-died in 1833; and another son, Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam, was taken from him, shortly after he had been called to the Bar, in 1850. Hallam wrote a memoir of his eldest son, prefixed to a collection of his literary remains

science and art, and the constellation of scholars and poets, of architects and painters, whose reflected beams cast their radiance around his head. His political reputation, though far less durable, was in his own age as conspicuous as that which he acquired in the history of letters. Equally active and sagacious, he held his way through the varying combinations of Italian policy, always with credit, and generally with success. Florence, if not enriched, was upon the whole aggrandised during his administration, which was exposed to some severe storms from the unscrupulous adversaries, Sixtus IV. and Ferdinand of Naples, whom he was compelled to resist. As a patriot, indeed, we never can bestow upon Lorenzo de' Medici the meed of disinterested virtue. He completed that subversion of the Florentine republic which his two immediate ancestors had so well prepared. The two councils, her regular legislature, he superseded by a permanent senate of seventy persons; while the gonfalonier and priors, become a mockery and pageant to keep up the illusion of liberty, were taught that in exercising a legitimate authority without the sanction of their prince, a name now first heard at Florence, they

incurred the risk of punishment for their audacity. Even the total dilapidation of his commercial wealth was repaired at the cost of the State; and the republic disgracefully screened the bankruptcy of the Medici by her own. But, compared with the statesmen of his age, we can reproach Lorenzo with no heinous crime. He had many enemies; his descendants had many more; but no unequivocal charge of treachery or assassination has been substantiated against his memory. By the side of Galeazzo or Ludovico Sforza, of Ferdinand or his son Alfonso of Naples, of the Pope Sixtus IV., he shines with unspotted lustre. So much was Lorenzo esteemed by his contemporaries that his premature death has frequently been considered as the cause of those unhappy revolutions that speedily ensued, and which his foresight would, it was imagined, have been able to prevent; an opinion which, whether founded in probability or otherwise, attests the common sentiment about his character.

If indeed Lorenzo de' Medici could not have changed the destinies of Italy, however premature his death may appear if we consider the ordinary duration of human existence, it must be admitted that for his own welfare, perhaps for his glory, he had lived out the full measure of his time. An age of new and uncommon revolutions was about to arise, among the earliest of which the temporary downfall of his family was to be reckoned. The long-contested succession of Naples was again to involve Italy in war. The ambition of strangers was once more to desolate her plains.

...

So long as the three great nations of Europe were unable to put forth their natural strength through internal separation or foreign war, the Italians had so little to dread for their independence that their policy was altogether directed to regulating the domestic balance of power among themselves. In the latter part of the fifteenth century a more enlarged view of Europe would have manifested the necessity of reconciling petty animosities and sacrificing petty ambition in order to preserve the nationality of their governments; not by attempting to melt down Lombards and Neapolitans, principalities and republics, into a single monarchy, but by the more just and rational scheme of a common federation. The politicians of Italy were abundantly competent, as far as cool and clear understandings could render them, to perceive the interests of their country. But it is the will of Providence that the highest and surest wisdom, even in matters of policy, should never be unconnected with virtue. In relieving himself from an immediate danger, Ludovico Sforza overlooked the consideration that the presumptive heir of the king of France claimed by an ancient title that principality of Milan which he was compassing by usurpation and murder. But neither Milan nor Naples was free from other claimants than France, nor was she reserved to enjoy unmolested the spoil of Italy. A louder and a louder strain of warlike dissonance will be heard from the banks of the Danube and from the Mediterranean gulf. The dark and wily Ferdinand, the rash and lively Maximilian, are preparing to hasten into the lists; the schemes of ambition are assuming a more comprehensive aspect; and the controversy of Neapolitan succession is to expand into the long rivalry between the houses of France and Austria. But here, while Italy is still untouched, and before as yet the first lances of France gleam along the defiles of the Alps, we close the history of the Middle Ages.

(From the State of Europe.)

Execution of Charles I.

The execution of Charles I. has been mentioned in later ages by a few with unlimited praise-by some with faint and ambiguous censure-by most with vehement reprobation. My own judgment will possibly be anticipated by the reader of the preceding pages. I shall certainly not rest it on the imaginary sacredness and divine origin of royalty, nor even on the irresponsibility with which the law of almost every country invests the person of its sovereign. Far be it from me to contend that no cases may be conceived, that no instances may be found in history, wherein the sympathy of mankind and the sound principles of political justice would approve a public judicial sentence as the due reward of tyranny and perfidiousness. But we may confidently deny that Charles I. was thus to be singled out as a warning to tyrants. His offences were not, in the worst interpretation, of that atrocious character which calls down the vengeance of insulted humanity, regardless of positive law. His government had been very arbitrary; but it may well be doubted whether any, even of his ministers, could have suffered death for their share in it without introducing a principle of barbarous vindictiveness. Far from the sanguinary misanthropy of some monarchs, or the revengeful fury of others, he had in no instance displayed, nor does the minutest scrutiny since made into his character entitle us to suppose, any malevolent dispositions beyond some proneness to anger and a considerable degree of harshness in his demeanour. As for the charge of having caused the bloodshed of the war, upon which, and not on any former misgovernment, his condemnation was grounded, it was as illestablished as it would have been insufficient. Well might the Earl of Northumberland say, when the ordinance for the king's trial was before the Lords, that the greatest part of the people of England were not yet satisfied whether the king levied war first against the Houses, or the Houses against him. The fact, in my opinion, was entirely otherwise. It is quite another question whether the parliament were justified in their resistance to the king's legal authority. But we may contend that when Hotham, by their command, shut the gates of Hull against his sovereign, when the militia was called out in different counties by an ordinance of the two Houses, both of which preceded by several weeks any levying of forces for the king, the bonds of our constitutional law were by them and their servants snapped asunder; and it would be the mere pedantry and chicane of political casuistry to inquire, even if the fact could be better ascertained, whether at Edgehill, or in the minor skirmishes that preceded, the first carbine was discharged by a cavalier or a roundhead. The aggressor in a war is not the first who uses force, but the first who renders force necessary.

But, whether we may think this war to have originated in the king's or the parliament's aggression, it is still evident that the former had a fair cause with the nation, a cause which it was no plain violation of justice to defend. He was supported by the greater part of the Peers, by full one-third of the Commons, by the principal body of the gentry, and a large proportion of other classes. If his adherents did not form, as I think they did not, the majority of the people, they were at least more numerous, beyond comparison, than those who demanded or approved of his death. The steady,

deliberate perseverance of so considerable a body in any cause takes away the right of punishment from the conquerors, beyond what their own safety or reasonable indemnification may require. The vanquished are to be judged by the rules of national, not of municipal law. Hence, if Charles, after having by a course of victories or the defection of the people prostrated all opposition, had abused his triumph by the execution of Essex or Hampden, Fairfax or Cromwell, I think that later ages would have disapproved of their deaths as positively, though not quite as vehemently, as they have of his own. The line is not easily drawn, in abstract reasoning, between the treason which is justly punished and the social schism which is beyond the proper boundaries of law; but the civil war of England seems plainly to fall within the latter description. These objections strike me as unanswerable, even if the trial of Charles had been sanctioned by the voice of the nation through its legitimate representatives, or at least such a fair and full convention as might, in great necessity, supply the place of lawful authority. But it was, as we all know, the act of a bold but very small minority, who, having forcibly expelled their colleagues from parliament, had usurped, under the protection of a military force, that power which all England reckoned illegal. I cannot perceive what there was in the imagined solemnity of this proceeding, in that insolent mockery of the forms of justice, accompanied by all unfairness and inhumanity in its circumstances, which can alleviate the guilt of the transaction; and if it be alleged that many of the regicides were firmly persuaded in their consciences of the right and duty of condemning the king, we may surely remember that private murderers have often had the same apology.

In discussing each particular transaction in the life of Charles, as of any other sovereign, it is required by the truth of history to spare no just animadversion upon his faults; especially where much art has been employed by the writers most in repute to carry the stream of public prejudice in an opposite direction. But when we come to a general estimate of his character, we should act unfairly not to give their full weight to those peculiar circumstances of his condition in this worldly scene which tend to account for and extenuate his failings. The station of kings is, in a moral sense, so unfavourable that those who are least prone to servile admiration should be on their guard against the opposite error of an uncandid severity. There seems no fairer method of estimating the intrinsic worth of a sovereign than to treat him as a subject, and to judge, so far as the history of his life enables us, what he would have been in that more private and happier condition from which the chance of birth has excluded him. Tried by this test, we cannot doubt that Charles I. would have been not altogether an amiable man, but one deserving of general esteem; his firm and conscientious virtues the same, his deviations from right far less frequent than upon the throne. It is to be pleaded for this prince that his youth had breathed but the contaminated air of a profligate and servile court-that he had imbibed the lessons of arbitrary power from all who surrounded him--that he had been betrayed by a father's culpable blindness into the dangerous society of an ambitious, unprincipled favourite. To have maintained so much correctness of morality as his enemies confess, was a proof of Charles's virtuous dispositions; but his advocates are compelled also to

own that he did not escape as little injured by the poisonous adulation to which he had listened. Of a temper by nature, and by want of restraint, too passionate, though not vindictive, and, though not cruel, certainly deficient in gentleness and humanity, he was entirely unfit for the very difficult station of royalty, and especially for that of a constitutional king. It is impossible to excuse his violations of liberty on the score of ignorance, especially after the Petition of Right; because his impatience of opposition from his council made it unsafe to give him any advice that thwarted his determination. His other great fault was want of sincerity-a fault that appeared in all parts of his life, and from which no one who has paid the subject any attention will pretend to exculpate him. Those indeed who know nothing but what they find in Hume may believe, on Hume's authority, that the king's contemporaries never deemed of imputing to him any deviation from good faith; as if the whole conduct of the parliament had not been evidently founded upon a distrust which on many occasions they very explicitly declared. But, so far as this insincerity was shown in the course of his troubles, it was a failing which untoward circumstances are apt to produce, and which the extreme hypocrisy of many among his adversaries might sometimes palliate. Few personages in history, we should recollect, have had so much of their actions revealed and commented upon as Charles; it is perhaps a mortifying truth that those who have stood highest with posterity have seldom been those who have been most accurately known.

(From the Constitutional History.)

Shakspeare's Self-retrospection. There seems to have been a period of Shakspeare's life when his heart was ill at ease, and ill content with the world and his own conscience; the memory of hours misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited, the experience of man's worser nature, which intercourse with unworthy associates, by choice or circumstances, peculiarly teaches: these, as they sank into the depths of his great mind, seem not only to have inspired into it the conception of Lear and Timon, but that of one primary character, the censurer of mankind. This type is first seen in the philosophic melancholy of Jaques, gazing with an undiminished serenity, and with a gaiety of fancy, though not of manners, on the follies of the world. It assumes a graver cast in the exiled Duke of the same play, and next one rather more severe in the Duke of Measure for Measure. In all these, however, it is merely contemplative philosophy. In Hamlet this is mingled with the impulses of a perturbed heart under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances; it shines no longer, as in the former characters, with a steady light, but plays in fitful coruscations amidst feigned gaiety and extravagance. In Lear it is the flash of sudden inspiration across the incongruous imagery of madness; in Timon it is obscured by the exaggerations of misanthropy. These plays all belong to nearly the same period: As You Like It being usually referred to 1600, Timon to the same year, Measure for Measure to 1603, and Lear to 1604. In the later plays of Shakspeare, especially in Macbeth and the Tempest, much of moral speculation will be found, but he has never returned to this type of character in the personages.

(From the Literature of Europe.)

Blind Milton's Memories.

In the numerous imitations, and still more numerous traces, of older poetry which we perceive in Paradise Lost, it is always to be kept in mind that he had only his recollection to rely upon. His blindness seems to have been complete before 1654; and I scarcely think he had begun his poem before the anxiety and trouble into which the public strife of the Commonwealth and Restoration had thrown him gave leisure for immortal occupations. Then the remembrance of early reading came over his dark and lonely path, like the moon emerging from the clouds. Then it was that the Muse was truly his; not only as she poured her creative inspiration into his mind, but as the daughter of Memory, coming with fragments of ancient melodies, the voice of Euripides, and Homer, and Tasso; sounds that he had loved in youth, and treasured up for the solace of his age. They who, though not enduring the calamity of Milton, have known what it is, when afar from books, in solitude or in travelling, or in the intervals of worldly care, to feed on poetical recollections, to murmur over the beautiful lines whose cadence has long delighted their ear, to recall the sentiments and images which retain by association the charm that early years once gave them-they will feel the inestimable value of committing to the memory, in the prime of its power, what it will easily receive and indelibly retain. I know not, indeed, whether an education that deals much with poetry, such as is still usual in England, has any more solid argument among many in its favour than that it lays the foundation of intellectual pleasures at the other extreme of life.

(From the Literature of Europe.)

Hallam has not found a detailed biographer; the facts of his life inust be sought for in the obituary notices of the Times, the Royal Society's Transactions, and Mignet's Notice Historique read to the French Academy of Sciences, Harriet Martineau's Biographi cal Sketches, and similar brief articles. There have been many editions and abridgments of his works.

Richard Whately (1787-1863), Archbishop of Dublin, was born in London, fourth son of Dr Joseph Whately of Nonsuch Park, Surrey, who was vicar of Widford, prebendary of Bristol, and lecturer at Gresham College. From a private school at Bristol, Richard in 1805 passed to Oriel College; at Oxford he gained the prize for the English essay (1810), and was elected a Fellow of Oriel (1811), where Copleston, Davidson, Arnold, Keble, and Hawkins were already Fellows, and Newman and Pusey were to be ere long. In his Apologia Newman has recorded that it was Whately who opened his mind and taught him how to think and reason. Become one of the college tutors (1815), he wrote for the Encyclopædia Metropolitana what he afterwards expanded into his popular treatises on Logic (1826) and Rhetoric (1828). had married in 1821, and accepted the living of Halesworth in Suffolk; and he had already given the world the first proof of his characteristic humour in Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte (1819)—an ingenious attempt to reduce to an absurdity Hume's position that no testimony is sufficient to prove a miracle. In 1822 he delivered the Bampton Lectures at Oxford, on the Use and Abuse of Party Feeling in Religion.

He

In 1825 he was appointed Principal of St Alban's Hall, and in 1829 Professor of Political Economy, but had only given a few lectures when in 1831 he was made Archbishop of Dublin. Whately, though a strong logician, had little of the speculative faculty, had no faith in metaphysics or dogmatic theology, read little but a few favourite authors, knew little French and no German, and contemned classical researches as much as he did modern art. But his acute intellect enlightened every subject that he touched, and his powers of exposition and illustration have hardly ever been surpassed. A Liberal in religion and in politics, he may be counted one of the founders of the Broad Church party. Broadly rational in temper, sober and impartial, he was a resolute opponent of the Tractarian movement, but to the Evangelicals he seemed little better than a Latitudinarian, for he supported Catholic emancipation and concurrent endowment, and laboured long, but in vain, to establish a system of unsectarian religious instruction. Still worse, he was more than suspected of holding unsound views on future punishment and the Sabbath question, and of being somewhat Sabellian on the nature and attributes of Christ; he was always an outspoken denouncer of Calvinism. His caustic wit, abrupt manners, and fearless outspokenness brought him no little unpopularity, but the sterling honesty of his nature, his charity, justice, and sagacity, gained him many friendships of unusual permanence and warmth, and conquered for him the respect of all Of his books may be named Essays on some of the Peculiarities of the Christian Religion (1825), Essays on some of the Difficulties in the Writings of St Paul (1828), Thoughts on the Sabbath (1830), Christian Evidences (1837), Essays on some of the Dangers to Christian Faith (1839), The Kingdom of Christ Delineated (1841), and his edition of Bacon's Essays, with annotations not unworthy of the text (1856), as well as Paley's Evidences and Moral Philosophy.

men.

From the 'Historic Doubts.'

Now this is precisely the point I am tending to, for the fact exactly accords with the above supposition, the discordance and mutual contradictions of these witnesses being such as would alone throw a considerable shade of doubt over their testimony. It is not in minute circumstances alone that the discrepancy appears, such as might be expected to appear in a narrative substantially true, but in very great and leading transactions, and such as are very intimately connected with the supposed hero. For instance, it is by no means agreed whether Bonaparte led in person the celebrated charge over the bridge of Lodi (for celebrated it certainly is, as well as the siege of Troy, whether either event ever really took place or no), or was safe in the rear, while Augereau performed the exploit: the same doubt hangs over the charge of the French cavalry at Waterloo. It is no less uncertain whether or no this strange personage poisoned in Egypt a hospitalful of his own soldiers, and butchered in cold blood a garrison that had surrendered. But, not to multiply instances, the battle of Borodino, which is represented as one of the greatest ever fought, is unequivocally

claimed as a victory by both parties; nor is the question decided at this day. We have official accounts on both sides, circumstantially detailed, in the names of supposed respectable persons professing to have been present on the spot, yet totally irreconcilable. Both these accounts may be false; but since one of them must be false, that one (it is no matter which we suppose) proves incontrovertibly this important maxim: that it is possible for a narrative, however circumstantial, however steadily maintained, however public and however important the event it relates, however grave the authority on which it is published, to be nevertheless an entire fabrication!

Many of the events which have been recorded were probably believed much the more readily and firmly from the apparent caution and hesitation with which they were at first published-the vehement contradiction in our papers of many pretended French accounts, and the abuse lavished upon them for falsehood, exaggeration, and gasconade. But is it not possible-is it not indeed perfectly natural—that the publishers of known falsehood should assume this cautious demeanour and this abhorrence of exaggeration in order the more easily to gain credit? Is it not also very possible that those who actu ally believed what they published may have suspected mere exaggeration in stories which were entire fictions? Many men have that sort of simplicity that they think themselves quite secure against being deceived provided they believe only part of the story they hear, when perhaps the whole is equally false. So that perhaps these simple-hearted editors, who were so vehement against lying bulletins and so wary in announcing their great news, were in the condition of a clown who thinks he has bought a great bargain of a Jew because he has beat down the price, perhaps from a guinea to a crown, for some article that is not really worth a groat.

With respect to the character of Bonaparte, the dissonance is, if possible, still greater. According to some he was a wise, humane, magnanimous hero-others paint him as a monster of cruelty, meanness, and perfidy; some, even of those who are the most inveterate against him, speak very highly of his political and military abilityothers place him on the very verge of insanity. But, allowing that all this may be the colouring of party prejudice (which surely is allowing a great deal), there is one point to which such a solution will hardly apply. If there be anything that can be clearly ascertained in history, one would think it must be the personal courage of a military man; yet here we are as much at a loss as ever at the very same times and on the same occasions he is described by different writers as a man of undaunted intrepidity and as an absolute poltroon.

What, then, are we to believe? If we are disposed to credit all that is told us, we must believe in the existence not only of one, but of two or three Bonapartes; if we admit nothing but what is well authenticated, we shall be compelled to doubt of the existence of any.

It appears, then, that those on whose testimony the existence and actions of Bonaparte are generally believed fail in all the most essential points on which the credi bility of witnesses depends: first, we have no assurance that they have access to correct information; secondly, they have an apparent interest in propagating falsehood; and, thirdly, they palpably contradict each other in the most important points.

Another circumstance which throws additional suspicion on these tales is that the Whig party, as they are

called the warm advocates for liberty, and opposers of the encroachments of monarchical power-have for some time past strenuously espoused the cause and vindicated the character of Bonaparte, who is represented by all as having been, if not a tyrant, at least an absolute despot. One of the most forward in this cause is a gentleman who once stood foremost in holding up this very man to public execration-who first published, and long maintained against popular incredulity, the accounts of his atrocities in Egypt. Now, that such a course should be adopted, for party purposes, by those who are aware that the whole story is a fiction, and the hero of it imaginary, seems not very incredible; but if they believed in the real existence of this despot, I cannot conceive how they could so forsake their principles as to advocate his cause and eulogise his character.

After all, it may be expected that many who perceive the force of these objections will yet be loth to think it possible that they and the public at large can have been so long and so greatly imposed upon; and thus it is that the magnitude and boldness of a fraud become its best support the millions who for so many ages have believed in Mahomet or Brahma lean, as it were, on each other for support, and not having vigour of mind enough boldly to throw off vulgar prejudices and dare be wiser than the multitude, persuade themselves that what so many have acknowledged must be true. But I call on those who boast their philosophical freedom of thought, and would fain tread in the steps of Hume and other inquirers of the like exalted and speculative genius, to follow up fairly and fully their own principles, and, throwing off the shackles of authority, to examine carefully the evidence of whatever is proposed to them, before they admit its truth. That even in this enlightened age, as it is called, a whole nation may be egregiously imposed upon, even in matters which intimately concern them, may be proved (if it has not been already proved) by the following instance. It was stated in the newspapers that a month after the battle of Trafalgar an English officer, who had been a prisoner of war, and was exchanged, returned to this country from France, and, beginning to condole with his countrymen on the terrible defeat they had sustained, was infinitely astonished to learn that the battle of Trafalgar was a splendid victory: he had been assured, he said, that in that battle the English had been totally defeated, and the French were fully and universally persuaded that such was the fact. Now, if this report of the belief of the French nation was not true, the British public were completely imposed upon; if it were true, then both nations were at the same time rejoicing in the event of the same battle as a signal victory to themselves, and consequently one or other at least of these nations must have been the dupes of their Government; for if the battle was never fought at all, or was not decisive on either side, in that case both parties were deceived. This instance, I conceive, is absolutely demonstrative of the point in question.

'But what shall we say to the testimony of those many respectable persons who went to Plymouth on purpose, and saw Bonaparte with their own eyes? Must they not trust their senses?' I would not disparage either the eyesight or the veracity of these gentlemen. I am ready to allow that they went to Plymouth for the purpose of seeing Bonaparte-nay, more, that they actually rowed out into the harbour in a boat, and came alongside of a man-of-war, on whose deck they saw a man in a