uninterrupted course of political prosperity (as far as related to his personal administration), without a single check of adversity for nineteen years. But whatever may be the cause, he has lost much of his popularity, and of the public good opinion, from his conduct at this period; and if he retains office, he will find his followers much diminished, and by no means so inclined to vote implicitly with him as before.'—Vol. iv. p. 33.

All this is overturned in a letter from Canning, October 20, 1802. He says

'That Mr. Pitt told him that he went out not on the Catholic Question simply as a measure on which he was opposed, but from the manner in which he had been opposed, and to which, if he had assented, he would, as a minister, have been on a footing totally different from what he had ever before been in the Cabinet. This obliged him to resign; but as his sincere wish was, that his going out should neither distress the King nor the country, he had required no one to follow him. Those who did, did it voluntarily, regardless of his desire!.... It had been his anxious hope and endeavour to leave behind him such a ministry as would be most agreeable to his Majesty; who, in all great national points, would act as he had acted. It was to forward this, his favourite purpose, that he had pledged himself, but himself simply, to advise and support the present ministry.'

Then follow the notes of a personal conference.

'CANNING." Is not then the time arrived when you, Pitt, are called upon by the strongest and most paramount of all duties to come forward and resume your position?" PITT.-"I do not affect to deny it; I will not affect a childish modesty; but recollect what I have just said, I stand pledged: I make no scruple of owning that I am ambitious; but my ambition is character, not office." CANNING." I repeat, is it not your duty, after the sentiments which you have avowed, and the danger you admit the country to be in, to require this release from him (Addington)?" PITT.-"I cannot bring myself to do it. It is impossible to prevent its wearing the appearance of caballing and intriguing for power. I may be overfeeling about character."-Vol, iv. pp. 75, 78.

Somewhat later we hear of the attempt made by Lord Melville to induce Mr. Pitt to engage as Addington's equal in the ministry; a story told with little variation in the Life of Wilberforce.

'Lord Melville came charged with a proposal from Addington for Pitt to resume office-Pitt and Addington to be the two Secretaries of State; Pitt to have the nomination to one Cabinet, and one Privy Councillor's office; an indifferent person to be First Lord of the Treasury. (It is thought Adddington had Lord Chatham in view for this, and had fixed particularly on him to embarrass Pitt). Lord Melville himself (probably) First Lord of the Admiralty.

'Pitt rejected this offer the moment it was made him: said, so far

from even listening to any plan in which the person who was to be the real and effective first minister was to be disguised or concealed, he thought it indispensable that it should at all times, and in every administration, be evident and manifest who this person was; and that he never would take part in any arrangement where this did not clearly appear. That this alone would have induced him to set aside the proposal he heard, but that it was inadmissible in every part, and not worth discussion. "Vol. iv. p. 177,

Wilberforce, speaking from Pitt's own account of the interview, as it appears, which Lord Malmesbury did not, adds,Dundas saw it would not do, and stopped abruptly. "Really," ' said Pitt, with a sly severity, and it was almost the only sharp thing I ever heard him say of any friend, "I had not the 'curiosity to ask what I was to be."'-Wilberforce's Life, vol. iii. p. 219.

6

Lord Pelham acceded to all I said,-promised to mention it to Addington; but added, that whenever any one talked to him on subjects he did not understand, or was not used to, he always got rid of the subject, by telling some bon mot or dull joke of Halsell's, when he was Speaker.'-Vol. iv. p. 197,

Alas, for human reputation, that poor Hatsell's jokes should not only be voted dull, but that his Precedents should not suffice even to make his name known to the new race of statesmen !

Lord Malmesbury's early knowledge of Spain, from his official residence there, enabled him to detect some mistakes in our mode of supporting that country during its struggle with Napoleon.

"The character of the Spaniard is to let everything be done for him, if he finds any disposed to do it, and never to act till obliged to do so. This has appeared, and will appear in every event of the contest with France. Not foreseeing this, and placing an implicit confidence in the first two deputies who arrived from Gijon (in Asturias), we have, by wishing to do too much, injured the cause. I at once saw what they were. Materasa (a Viscount), a young, raw Asturian Hidalgo, and Don Diego de Vega, an Asturian attorney,-both, I dare say, well-meaning and well-thinking, but of no consequence. In fact, Asturias is a province that is of as little consequence with reference to the kingdom of Spain, as Glamorganshire is to England.'- Vol. iv. 407.

We cannot give the noble editor equal credit for 'seeing at once' the purport of another passage of his grandfather's journal, in which Spain is mentioned.

'That Spain was completely subservient to France, and that Buonaparte should think the Spanish, by going to war with us, would be more useful for his purposes than the tribute he now received. This would happen.'-Vol. iv. p. 312.

We venture to amend, without professing that we have the

sanction of any other codex than that which we suppose is in the present Lord Malmesbury's bureau:

That Spain was completely subservient to France; and that if Buonaparte should think the Spanish, by going to war with us, would be more useful for his purposes than the tribute he now received, this would happen.'

Lord Malmesbury wrote sense always-sometimes English. We will close with one further observation, that these journals show the wisdom of those attempts at peace which were frequently made during the earlier part of the revolutionary war, and which issued in the short peace of 1801. These conciliatory measures were commenced by Pitt in 1795, in the very autumn after he had opposed the motion of Wilberforce for a negotiation with France. They lasted, with various intermissions, till the Peace of Amiens. Neither from them indeed, nor from the Peace of Amiens, was any solid or lasting quiet to be expected. But they proved to the nation at large the nature of the struggle in which we were engaged. They showed the real objects of the enemy-the internecine nature of his assaults-and that our only safety was in victory. This it was which bound together the whole people of England as one man. The last years of the war therefore were eminently popular. And when it pleased God to set a hero at the head of our armies, by whom the patriotism of our statesmen and the valour of our soldiers were duly improved, then it was that those great events succeeded one another in rapid career, which made the last war so glorious to England, and so imperishable a portion of the history of the world.

26

ART. II.-English Churchwomen of the Seventeenth Century. London: Burns. 1845. Pp. 362.

THE Churchwomen of the Seventeenth Century' appear, in these Notices, in a shape which particularly suits them, and brings them out. A more unpretending, solid little book we never saw; its plainness, at the same time, bearing the stamp of true elegance and perfect taste. It reminds us of the manners of a wellbred person in society, with their rigid exclusion of all officious display. It presents a great contrast in this respect to the tone in which modern religious biography has been often conducted. There is no introduction of set phrases and forms of speech, such as come in at certain turns in many books of this class, and which may be anticipated with almost unerring accuracy. There are no reflections introduced for their own sake-no interpolations bearing upon things in general: there is no filling up and rounding off with extraneous subjects. The writer-we detect a female hand-pursues her own even course, and has the character she is describing always close to her. She draws it out with simple effect, and we have the character only before us, and see nothing of the hand which is drawing it. She maintains just that quiet and natural tone which is so desirable in this department, and sets us completely at our ease as to the reality of what we are reading about. The persons we feel sure were just the persons that are here described. For any influence that a book of this class is to have, it is evident how important an impression this is to produce. The mind cannot leave these pages and think it has been looking on a picture. It has come into contact with real persons, and seen religion in living practical form before it. A calm reality pervades the whole book. The writer sympathizes with her characters; her own mind unconsciously mingles with them; and she puts them before us with the quiet self-possession of a person who is describing tempers and forms of religion which she understands, and to which she feels an assimilation.

To any one, then, who may wish to know what the internal domestic religion of good Church-people in those times was, this little book will give the information wanted. It presents, within a small compass, the state of religion in our Church, as the teaching of the Caroline divines had moulded it. It is a picture of the domestic, retired, interior Church of England of that day. It is confined, indeed, to one sex; and so far is a partial picture.

But there is quite enough in it to show what the religious standard of the day was.

There is one reason in particular which makes us glad to see such a book as this. There is a popular impression respecting these times, which meets with a strong and somewhat irresistible answer in it. There is a popular impression that the Church religion of these times was a formal and secular one, that the Puritans were the only persons of vital and spiritual religion, and that Church-people did little more than stand up for a formal ceremonial, and a stiff liturgical routine. The Church religion of the Caroline times and the high Churchmanship' of a later date has been all put together under one head, and the same charge has served for both. And persons, in thinking of this period, have before them a compound image of ambitious prelates and rubrical innovations on the one hand, and balls and masks, and Cavalier revelling and dissipation, on the other. To the Church has been assigned the worldliness and pomp of the age, and to the Puritanical party the religion. Even moderate and impartial minds are ready to make the concession, and to allow that, though Charles had the best cause, the opposite side had the best men. It is, indeed, easy to see how prominent a feature the gay profligacy of the Cavaliers must be when people only see that one feature, and see nothing else. The faults in the Royalist party were of the more open and palpable sort, such as catch the eye readily. And thus persons go off with an image of a gay Royalist Court, and a dashing Royalist camp, and Cavaliers with white feathers and prancing steeds, in their heads, and think they have got at the state of religion on the Church side, and fix the Church's standard accordingly.

It must be on some such very superficial view as this that the idea we are alluding to is formed, for there is literally no reasonable ground whatever for it. It stands refuted the very first time that we allow our eye fairly to rest on the plain facts of the case as respects these times. What are the very first names that come across us in reading of those times-of what do our most familiar Church names remind us, but of men who lived lives of unwearying self-denial and aspiring devotion; men who watched, fasted, and prayed night and day? George Herbert and Nicolas Ferrar, Hammond and Sanderson, Morton, Thorndike, Ken, and many others, may have pursued a line of devotion with which many cannot sympathize, but that they were men of an intensely devotional spirit appears to be a simple fact, which any dissenter even must allow who knows anything about them. From what quarter do our warmest books of devotion come, our most searching guides to conscience, the loftiest and most ambitious calls to the life spiritual, but from this? Men judge from