upon the immediate evacuation of the Danubian provinces by the Russian armies; and Lord Palmerston closed the session by an assertion of his confident belief that such would be the case.

We have said enough to show that the session of 1853 has been peculiarly a session of work, and of work mainly done by Government. The most important private enterprises were Lord Blandford's Episcopal and Capitular Estates Bill, which was postponed, and Mr. Milner Gibson's renewed attempt to reform the system of county taxation and administration; another herculean labour which Lord Palmerston has gallantly undertaken. The work has been accompanied with a vast deal of talk, but there have been fewer remarkable speeches than usual. Since the coalition'

topic has broken down, and Sir John Pakington has assumed the leadership of the country gentlemen, Mr. Disraeli's vocation seems to be gone. His principal objects have been, to play the Foreign Minister of the Opposition, and to avoid committing himself as to the future. Mr. Macaulay delighted the House, containing so many men who only knew him as a writer, with two interesting and vehement essays, one upon the history of the judicial element in Parliament, apropos of the Judges Exclusion Bill, which he defeated at its last stage; the other upon the Government of India. But, next to Mr. Gladstone, the foremost figure in the Parliamentary mêlée has undoubtedly been that of John Bright. Often wanting in taste and tact, he has shown himself more than

ever a most powerful and ready debater; and, evidently growing out of the trammels of the narrow school in which he was bred, he has raised and improved both the form and substance of his speeches, and has gained considerable influence over a large and varied section of the House of Commons.

Besides public committees upon such important subjects as India, railway legislation, assurance associations, criminal and destitute children, the National Gallery, rural police, &c., private business and election petitions have consumed a vast deal of time and labour. For some days in the height of the session, some forty committees filled all the rooms along the corridors of the Palace, and occupied even the division lobbies of the House itself.

The mention of the election committees, which have done their work so thoroughly, and have had so great an influence on public opinion, reminds us of that promised reform of the representation which their revelations have rendered more than ever imperative. Many may doubt whether Lord Aberdeen's Ministry will be able to agree upon a question of so organic a kind; Liberals may fear that it will be too conservative, Conservatives, that it will be too radical; but we have great hopes that it will be of such a stamp, neither timid nor onesided, as shall satisfy the reasonable expectations of the country, and leave Parliament a freer and fitter instrument of that social improvement which ought to be the end and object of every change in our representative system.

tive and changing the proportions. One of the chief boasts of modern historians is their scrupulousness and accuracy about facts; to misstate a fact where the writer has an opportunity of knowing the real circumstances of it is a serious offence, and is recognised on all sides as being so. But men who will not say anything which is false, are less careful to say the whole of what is true, and though it be wrong to misstate, it is not so decidedly wrong to omit. It may be true that there is no such thing as an absolutely faultless character. In all human lives there may be found detached actions, momentary yieldings to strong temptations, which will not bear scrutiny. Perhaps in all men there may be some permanently weak side on which they are liable to surprise; but the opinion which we are to form of such men, on the whole, depends on the proportion which the unsound bears to the sound; and of this, of course, there may be every degree. Now suppose the faulty part forms some five per cent. of the entire result, and that, in consequence of the vastly preponderating goodness, this small fraction has been overlooked, or pardoned, or forgotten, how easy it must be for a skilful person, writing long after, when the value of the service done is less actively appreciated, to rake the five faults into light again, to insist upon them, to drag them into prominence; and treating them as if they were characteristics, and interpreting with them whatever is obscure in the general story, to fling a shadow over the whole of it. And then, though nothing has been said which is positively untrue, what amount of truth is there likely to be in the resulting estimate? Macaulay's character of Cranmer may be taken as the most successful instance of a proceeding of this kind, or Dr. Lingard's of the reformers generally.

Another method, requiring less skill, and therefore of more general employment, is the suggestion of motives. It is wrong to invent a fact, or even to hazard the assertion of a fact, without definite evidence ; but, with bad evidence or with good, with any or with none, we find our historians laying down the reasons

was

why this or that action done, with as much peremptoriness, and certainty, as if they had shared the most intimate confidence of the performers. Mr. Tytler and Miss Strickland are as well acquainted with the secret springs of action in Lord Burleigh and Sir Francis Walsingham as if they had been present at the dissection of their consciences.

Again, with periods in which party feeling has run high, there is no difficulty in procuring contemporary authority, apparently respectable, in proof of contradictory conclusions. Calumnies, which, in quiet times, would be passed over with contempt, are caught at by the credulity of better natures, when rendered sensitive by political or theological animosity; and facts on either side are magnified or diminished, are asserted or denied, not from any careful examination of the evidence on which they rest, but because each party finds it impossible to believe its own side less than excellent, and its opponents less than infamous. It is, therefore, extremely difficult, even with the most single-minded intention, to distinguish, at such times, between the true and the false; and the question is no longer of the evidence itself, but of the character of those by whom it is given.

It is easy to see therefore how, by a dexterous person, the same general features may be made to wear expressions strangely opposite, without any direct or obvious violation of truth. The party historian, who believes his own side and disbelieves the other, inclines the scale by the mere choice of his witnesses. The moderate philosopher, diffident of humanity, but not despairing of it, strikes the balance between the opposing evidences; seeing truth on both sides, he compassionates and despises the blindness with which they attack and malign each other; and, pruning off all extreme statements, and taming down all extravagances, whether of hatred or of love, he brings the actors in the great life-drama before us, so bare of characteristics, that the species can no longer be recognised, the eagle looking much like the vulture, and the wolf like the hound. And we remark another curious feature

1853.1

in modern histories: wherever an action can bear more than one interpretation, the benefit of the doubt is almost uniformly given to those who are generally known to be bad, and refused to those who had a better right to ask for it. Writer after writer goes on repeating that Elizabeth murdered the Jesuits, when they know, or ought to know, that no Jesuit was ever proceeded against, except as a conspirator and a traitor; but her conduct admits of being represented as religious persecution, and they catch at the opportunity. Dr. Robertson thinks it more likely that the English ministers forged the documents which implicated the Queen of Scots in Babington's conspiracy, than that she herself, whom he acknowledged to have been a murderer and an adulteress, could have been a party to it. These are but two instances of a thousand, and we bring them forward here as no more than examples of a particular manner of writing history, which, for the last century, has been generally prevalent, and which men of the highest reputation have unhappily sanctioned by their practice.

The actions of men form their characters; but their characters, again, interpret their actions; and we cannot understand history unless we consent to accept the impressions formed of character by such contemporary living persons as were competent to form an opinion.

The

mere record of actions will for ever lead us astray. They are all embedded, so to say, in a series of circumstances out of which they have arisen, and which no effort of imagination will ever thoroughly reproduce; and we must either take the impression which was then produced by them, or give up history in despair. Nor, indeed, if human nature be no more than what, by the modern spirit of depreciation, it is made to appear, is there any reason why we should care for it. If there neither is nor ever has been anything in mankind which it is possible heartily or humbly to admire-if we are all but little beings, the best of us tainted with meanness, or only exempt from it when exempted by circumstances from temptation-surely the story of our doings had better die

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with ourselves. It is not well to moralise over our infirmities, and learn to content ourselves with a petty standard because it has never been transcended. We had better go elsewhere for our lessons of obedience-go to the meaner organizations-the flower, the bird, or the beast-and learn of them, who never break the laws of their being, how better to fulfil ours.

What we have said is intended as an introduction to a subject on which it is impossible to enter without a certain feeling of shame that it should be necessary to enter on it at all. If calumnies against the living be offences which the better sort of mankind will all unite with the injured persons in resenting and punishing, we cannot see that those who are unable to protect their own reputation are disentitled to the general protection which we extend to one another, or that, because men are dead, it has become lawful to speak evil of them with impunity. Slander is slander still; it is still an outcoming of the same mean miserable spirit which is unable to endure the reproach of greatness.

The

offence is the same, with the same moral turpitude; or, if there be any difference, to speak evil of the dead is the baser of the two; they cannot turn and defend themselves; and the meanness is enhanced by cowardice. It is time that the sense of the public should awake to a more just feeling of this; there is an insidious pleasure in depreciation, which requires us all to be on our most careful guard against it; and we cannot surround ourselves with too many securities. If it had been generally felt to be as dishonourable as it really is, to throw about offensive insinuations which cannot be maintained, we should not have found men of so high a character as those whom we shall presently have to call in question, in a position so discreditable to them.

It is well known that, early in the reign of Elizabeth, charges against her character, of a detestable kind, were widely circulated both in England and on the Continent. A young unmarried queen, with no near male relations, and, from the necessity of her position, surrounded by men with whom she was in close and

constant intercourse, could, at no time in the history of the world, have hoped to escape without insolent remarks being made upon her. It is the dower' of ladies in high position, that, be they as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, they shall not escape calumny.' In the sinks and cesspools of society there are always filthy lips to speak and filthy ears to listen. But the causes which would operate at all times in producing some degree of such abomination, were stimulated a thousand-fold in the case of Elizabeth, from the circumstances under which she was called to the throne. As she was the hope of the Reformers, so she soon became the detestation of the Catholics, and in her own person was the object of the animosity of three-fourths of Europe. Threefourths of Europe formed an audience ready prepared to hear and to believe the worst which could be said of her, and such an audience will never long want lips to speak to them. And, therefore, when we find that offensive things actually were said, we are to remember that something of the kind inevitably would be said. There is no occasion to be surprised; it is only what we might be quite certain beforehand we should find somewhere if we looked long enough and and close enough.

Even Queen Mary had not escaped from attacks of the same description. Obscene ballads had been scattered about the London streets, accusing her of being with child by Gardiner; and there was no public person on either side of whom slanders of the wildest kind were not everywhere circulated and believed. Elizabeth's bishops and ministers were described by Cardinal Allen as the very refuse of the worst sort of mortal men; infamous, amorous apostates, heretics, who, by their insatiable covetousness and concupiscence, have made lamentable havoc, waste, and destruction of the ancientest and honourablest spiritual state in Christendom' (Allen's Admonition). The particular charge of unchastity, so easy to bring and so hard to disprove, was flung to and fro with the most utter recklessness. All the leading reformers-Luther, Calvin, Theodore Beza, Knox, and Cranmer

-are described by Romanist writers as monsters of profligacy and lust; and chastity being the especial virtue of the Catholics, and unchastity therefore,

as a necessary consequence, the especial vice of the Protestants, the virgin Queen Elizabeth, proud and ostentatious of her virginity, must have been an incredible and intolerable spectacle to those who regarded virginity as their own peculiar grace. Accord ingly no efforts were spared, no filth was left unthrown, to defile her; in her purity she was the scandal of Catholicism, and, for the credit of the cause, it was necessary to envelop her in infamy. So the work went on. The mean and the base invented; the foolish and the bigoted listened and believed; and the unprincipled and the cunning caught up the useful instrument to further their own intrigues. She must be unchaste, and so she was: that was the argument. Cardinal Allen himself employs it in his pastoral exhortation of the English to rebellion. 'She is a caytif,' he says, 'under God's and Holy Church's curse; given up to a reprobate sense and hardness of heart, and therefore her open enormities and secret wickednesses must needs be great and not numerable.' At the night meetings of conspirators, behind the closed gates of the mutinous Catholic gentlemen, in the back rooms of the houses of the ambassadors of the Catholic powers, the slander manufactory went forward. From thence the precious productions flowed out over Europe to feed the hatred of the Spaniards, and to be the court gossip of the courtezans who were the companions of Catherine de Medicis. And now such of them as (thanks to the virtue of the paper) have survived three hundred years

being made venerable, we suppose, by age, and therefore entitled to respect-are quoted among ourselves as serious authorities. The name of Nicholas Saunders, among others, will be found at the foot of many pages of Lingard. His name passes muster as a contemporary authority; a clergyman in high position, &c., &c., as much entitled to be believed as anybody else; and no one complains; yet, whoever will submit to the offensive process of reading.