Cara Bey took heed of him, or seemed to be aware of his presence. At length, Hassan having ventured to announce his arrival, whilst he made his obeisance, the monster cast his eyes upwards, and eyeing Osmond and his attendants in silence, scrutinizing them from head to foot, and looking too suspicious not to throw doubt upon the sincerity of his greeting, he said doggedly, " Khosh geldin-you are welcome!""" -Ayesha, vol. ii. pp. 80-86. The whole character of this Cara Bey is drawn out with no ordinary skill and vigour; it is not, however, equal to the eunuchking in Zohrab-that, we suspect, will always be considered as Mr. Morier's chef-d'œuvre. ART. XI.-History of the Revolution in England in 1688. By the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh. 4to. pp. 784. London. WE 1834. E commenced the examination of this volume with the intention of considering merely its literary merit, and of giving some account of the life and writings of the amiable and accomplished author; but as we proceeded in the perusal, we have found the facts and sentiments so strangely exemplary of, and appropriate to, the prominent circumstances of the Revolution in which we are now struggling, that we feel ourselves irresistibly led to consider the work rather in the light of an important, and perhaps salutary, political lesson; and to postpone, for a season, our design of examining the merits of Sir James Mackintosh, as a mere historian and speculative moralist.* There can be nothing, in the great features of the Revolution of 1688, new to us or any well-informed reader. We have already indicated, in former Numbers, the analogy between the unconstitutional proceedings of the government of James II. and those of the existing ministry; but in the present crisis, in the prospect of a national peril which absorbs all other considerations and seems to require every honest attempt to suspend and mitigate, even if it be impossible wholly to avert it, we feel it to be our conscientious duty to take every fair opportunity of awakening the public mind to an adequate sense of our danger. There is no other solid use in history-and statesmen have We are the more willing to adopt this course, because an authentic account of Sir James's personal career is expected shortly from a member of his own family, and the biographical sketch prefixed to the volume now before us has been drawn up by one who evidently possessed no access to any private documents, and who has, on various occasions, adopted a tone of disparagement and censure, such as ought not to have been hazarded without the exhibition of solid proofs. This editor, by the way, is himself the author of a large part of the History now published. Sir James left his MS. unfinished; and the continuator, though a clever man, appears to have been oddly selected for this task-as he is not of Sir James's school. VOL. LI. NO. CII. 2 L counselled, counselled, and patriots have bled, and historians have written, in vain-if their posterity is not to take example by their acts and lessons from their counsels. But there is something in the peculiar circumstances of this work which appears to us to render it peculiarly authoritative at this crisis. Sir James Mackintosh began life as the advocate of the French revolution; his last act was to take a share in the present administration; and his last vote was in favour of the Reform Bill. He was a Whig and a minister-and his evidence, when it is reluctantly, or, we should rather say, unintentionally, given against his party, will probably have more weight than the testimony of an ordinary historian, and infinitely more than anything which we might urge on our own judgment or authority. It is not on the general principles of the Revolution of 1689 that Sir James Mackintosh can instruct the present generation : the opinions of moderate Whigs and enlightened Tories were always the same on that subject. The intolerable illegality of the measures of James-the painful duty of resistance—the ultimate expediency, not to say necessity, of calling a new sovereign to the throne-and the wisdom of deviating in that call as little as possible from the old line of succession-are, we suppose, universally admitted. In all that Sir James says of the imperative causes and of the salutary consequences of that Revolution, it were idle to say that we agree-because every writer and every thinker is of the same opinion; and if we were now criticising the work itself, we should perhaps observe, that he has taken superfluous pains in proving that which nobody (except the Jacobites) ever denied, and which-since the extinction of that political sect has never been questioned:-to use his own simple but expressive admonition to Auguste de Staël, who was elaborately proving some uncontroverted axiom,- We take all that for granted.' The lesson which the history of that Revolution can give to the present race of men is of a different, and of a more important, because more applicable and practical kind. The conduct of James and his cabinet shows, in the strongest light, how easily despotism can put on the abused mask of liberty, and bigotry and persecution make their approaches under the fraudulent pretences of toleration and charity! We there see that many, -almost all-of the patriotic professions, the liberal innovations, the popular reforms of the present day,-are copies or close imitations of the insidious practices of that rash, weak, hypocritical, and profligate administration. And when Sir James Mack * His last speech we cannot say-for that speech, like all his later writings, exhibited strong symptoms of doubt as to the soundness and salutary practical effects of the measures of his political friends, intosh intosh with all his enthusiasm for civil and religious libertyfeels it is his duty to expose the arts, by which those sacred words were prostituted to cover designs against both religion and freedom, we hope that his authority may tend to dispel a similar delusion, and to awaken the conscientious adherents-if there be any such-of Earl Grey's cabinet to a sense of similar dangers. We readily acquit his Majesty's ministers of such ultimate designs as the cabinet of James arrived at; and it is hardly necessary to say, that between our own gracious and well-intentioned sovereign, and the perversity of conscience, and the obliquity of judgment of the unhappy James, there is no resemblance whatsoever. But although, in this point, comparison fails, analogy is strong. James's ministers obeyed their master, the Kingour ministers obey their master, the faction whom they have made' viceroys over the king.' The form is a little different-the substance is the same: the king's name being, in both cases, abused, and his power distorted from its just and legitimate course. But besides the analogy between the position of the Cabinets of 1688 and 1831, there are between our ministers and those of James many points of individual resemblance, and between the measures of both there is a striking and fearful similitude. In endeavouring to exemplify that similitude, we shall select from Sir James Mackintosh several passages which appear to us surprisingly descriptive of what has been going on in England for the last two or three years; placing them in the order most analogous to our present circumstances. We shall afterwards proceed to show, in more detail, how the principles of James's ministers are brought into practical operation by ours. We begin by admitting, that neither the apostate Prime Minister-Sunderland, nor the crazy and intemperate ChancellorJeffreys, were originally desirous of going to the extreme lengths towards which they were first led by ambition and party spite, and then driven by a helpless necessity. They probably set out with no object but power and place; but, in their over-anxiety to preserve these, they set in motion a machine of mischief which they found they could not guide, and from which it became impossible to escape. The difficulties in which they had involved themselves were multiplied,' says Sir James, by the subtle and crooked policy of Sunderland, who, though willing to purchase his continuance in office by unbounded compliance, was yet extremely solicitous to adapt his various projects and reasonings to the circumstances of the moment. Placed between two precipices, and winding his course between them, he could find safety only by sometimes approaching one, and sometimes going nearer to the other.p. 225. In this attempt to keep his place by desultory stops and desultory advances 2 L 2 advances by courting occasionally the conservative party of the day against his own adherents, and then-by way of compensation -making a more furious plunge into the other extreme; and finally leaving every question more desperate than when he attempted to remedy it, Sunderland was the primum mobile of the mischief. By his external advantages of birth and fortune, joined to a polish and pliancy of manner which induced the king to forgive and forget the zeal and intemperance of his former opposition, he was perhaps the only man in England who could have kept together the discordant materials of which his ministry was composed-the only one who had the mingled indolence and impetuosity' which could breed such desperate resolves, and the baleful influence which could secure their execution. But alone he would not have sufficed to such extensive mischief. There were still laws in England, and it was necessary to pervert them and poison the fountains of justice, before the frame of the constitution could be radically disorganized. He found, for this purpose, a fit associate and agent in Lord Chancellor Jeffreys. 'A person,' says Sir James Mackintosh,' whose elevation to unusual honour and trust is characteristic of the government that he served. 'His powers of mind were extraordinary; his elocution, flowing and spirited; and, after his high preferment, in the few instances where he preserved temper and decency, the native vigour of his intellect shone forth, and threw a transient dignity over the coarseness of his deportment.'-p. 11. The union of a powerful understanding with boisterous violence and the basest subserviency singularly fitted him for the tool of a tyrant. He had that reputation for boldness which many men possess, as long as they are personally safe, by violence in their counsels and in their language.'—p. 12. 'His scurrilous invectives, and the tones and gestures of menace with which he was accustomed to overawe juries, roused the indignation, instead of commanding the acquiescence, of the Lords. this deportment cuts off all honourable retreat, the contemporary accounts are very probable, which represent him as sinking at once from insolence to meanness.'-p. 45. Sir James Mackintosh, though he notices cursorily a case of the Lord Chancellor's flaming drunkenness' on a solemn occasion, thought it, we suppose, beneath the dignity of history to preserve the details of what he describes as insolence and meanness.' We are sorry for it; we should have liked to compare them with some modern proceedings; which are, we think, curiousnay, important-enough, to deserve to be rescued from the ephemeral fate of a newspaper report. We should be curious to know whether Jeffreys ever, in his place in parliament-where it was his special duty to preserve and give give the example of decency and order-characterized an opinion of one of the bishops as a cloak for hypocrisy-a trap for tender consciences-and only suited to the uses of HYPOCRITES and JESUITS!'— whether he ever ventured-when a noble Peer had denied that he had committed some technical irregularity imputed to him by the Chancellor-to reply, • That it did not follow, as a matter of course, that because a person denied having done a thing, he did not, in point of FACT, do it. The noble Duke might have thought he was not doing so, but that did not alter the FACT. He had heard persons deny, a thousand times, FACTS, of which they were afterwards convicted!' 6 ( 'Homo disertus non intelligit eum quem contradicit laudari a se!*)-But when censured for this unparalleled indecorum,' we suspect Jeffreys had too proud a spirit to have defended himself by saying, • That he had NOT contradicted the noble Duke as to matter of FACT, but only as to matter of opinion.' We should like to know whether, a bill having been, on debate and division, admitted by the House of Lords to a second reading, Jeffreys ever entered a protest in such terms as the following: Dissentient, because it appears to me extremely discreditable to any legislative assembly to entertain a measure, &c. Because it avowedly seeks to check drunkenness; as if that were the only_vice now calling for prevention,' &c. 6 Because it appears to me, that countenancing a measure so framed and liable to such objections, is calculated to lower the authority of this House, exposing it to be charged with motives neither creditable to its wisdom and impartiality, &c.'-Times, May 19, 1834. We doubt whether it ever could have happened to Jeffreys, to tell individual Peers that there was no business to be done on a certain night, and when they, on this assurance, had withdrawn, to introduce two bills of great importance, which there was every reason to believe those very Peers would have stayed to oppose. We do, however, think it not unlikely, that if Jeffreys had done so and had been subsequently reproached for it by one of the Peers so deceived, he might have answered-not by apology for his error, or regret at the misapprehension, whichever it wasbut by assuring the noble Lord, and he begged that he might weigh and deliberate upon it as much as he pleased-that he (the Lord Chancellor) would not go out of his way an inch-no, not a hair's breadth-to save any measure of his from the observations, or any speech of his from being answered, by either the noble Earl, or the ILLUSTRIOUS Duke, or the noble *Cic. Phil. ii. Duke. |