we hope we should never permit to ourselves as against any baronet. As to his politics, they are not the politics of a sober spectator, nor even of a rational partisan; they are crazy idiosyncracies, such as we meet with here and there in life, when men seize us by the button with one hand, and thrust a pamphlet in our face with the other. Sir Archibald has ridden his jaded hobbies through twenty volumes, and of course he has found a few followers as silly as himself: but if we could find any reasonable being who had read these twenty volumes through, we would ask him, without fear as to his answer, whether Solomon Eagle, who, in the plague of London, passed his time in groaning out Woe! Woe! and in persuading people that there was an angel with a flaming sword visible in the sky, was more reasonable or more fanatical than this popular historian. But how can this be? How can a man with such odd notions write books that have such a large sale? The secret may be told in half a dozen sentences. punishment, yet we cannot spare him as a book of reference. This is the métier of Alison. He condenses Annual Registers, and makes good indexes: to call him an historian is to call a stonemason a sculptor, or a house-painter an artist. When we heard that this prosperous bookmaker was about to push his operations into contemporary times, we had some considerable misgivings as to the probable result. To write contemporary history, and to print it, is a very delicate matter; and we were of those who sat in a cold tremor at the Literary-Fund dinner in the Exhibition-year of 1851 while Sir Archibald expressed his idea of the duties of English hospitality to the illustrious Frenchmen who sat as guests around him, by reminding them of the victory of Waterloo, and the occupation of Paris by the allied armies.* The present enterprise is to take up the "History of Europe" where he left it, that is, in 1815, and to carry it down to this present year of grace, 1852. It is proposed to do this in five volumes. The first division comprises the period from the entry of the allies into Paris, to the passing of the Currency Act in 1819; and this is the subject of the volume now before us. The second is to end with the French revolution of 1830. The third takes the Reform-Bill struggle, and the career of the Grey and Melbourne administrations. The fourth, to use the author's As it appears incredible that such an exhibition of bad breeding could have been made by any literary man of accepted position, we feel bound to quote the passages of this speech: they are recorded in the printed Report of least such is the custom, an opportunity of correcting the the Literary-Fund Club for 1851. The speaker had, at report of his speech. The fact is, that people do not read Sir Archibald's books any more than they read his Essays; but they buy them. They place them on their shelves, and they find them very useful there. We ourselves have bought Alison's twenty volumes, and we should be sorry to be without them. We would not give sixpence for all the opinions they contain, but we cannot afford to be without ready reference to his facts. A hundred points of discussion are daily arising in conversation as to events of the last thirty years a hundred doubts arise as to dates or small particulars. We want to recollect when the Marrs were murdered; what became of Hunt after the Spa-Fields riots; what were the circumstances of Peltier's trial for his libel on Napoleon; how the ministers defended the Copenhagen business. What are we to do? It is not every small library that has a complete set of "Hansard," and also an unbroken series of the "Annual Register;" but there is a good index to Alison, and we are sure to find it at once there. People go to Alison instead of writing to "Bell's Life" or to "Notes and Queries;" and if the information they get is not always so full and accurate, the process is less troublesome. With all his wordiness, and all his absurd crotchets, he used to be a careful, diligent, and most copious compiler; and although we should no more think of reading him in cold blood, than we should think of reading Guicciardini, whom a Pope once used as an alternative for capital capital of continental Europe. But what a contrast is "I cannot," he said, "but recollect that the time is not distant, when-myself and many whom I now address remember it well-when the troops of England, Belgium, Turkey, and Spain, stood side by side, on different occasions, in combating for the liberties of mankind; we cannot but recollect that the first occasion when the soldiers of England found really powerful allies, was in the Turkthe armies of England to victory, was when they were ish troops; that the next occasion, when Wellington led supported by the Spanish troops; and that the last and crowning occasion, when the liberties of Europe were secured by Great Britain, was when the troops of England, of Prussia, and of Belgium, stood side by side upon the field of Waterloo. * * * * "Gentlemen, five and thirty years ago I had the pleasure of seeing the congress of all the nations of Europe held in Paris. That was a military congress: the uniforms of all nations were to be seen in the streets of the now exhibited, after the lapse of six and thirty years, in the congress we now see! At that time Paris was occupied by 200,000 troops," &c. &c. Baron Charles Dupin was sitting opposite to Mr. Alison while he was indulging in these well-timed reminiscences. The audience listened in abashed silence, but in uncomfortable apprehension as to what might come next. own words, "Commencing with the noble constancy displayed by Sir Robert Peel" (somewhat slipshod English by the way) "and the English Government in 1842, terminates with the overthrow of Louis Philippe, and consequent European revolutions, in 1848." The fifth is to terminate with the seizure of supreme power by Louis Napoleon in 1852. Always taking it for granted that there will be a very copious index at the end of the fifth volume, or perhaps forming a sixth, this, when completed and printed in a cheap form, might have made a very valuable book of reference. The street fighting in Paris will be described with great care; all the accounts in the Times of the campaigns of Radetski will be carefully condensed; and Charles Albert might have learned, had he survived to hear the information, how he could have beaten off the Austrian and Hungarian troops, and freed Italy from the accursed yoke of the barbarian, "without risk to either party." The debates in Parliament will be condensed, of course in a somewhat onesided manner--or why should the author be a baronet?-and the annual register of each year will be stewed down into a jelly, and served up with an ornamental heading of well-whipped froth. We are sorry to say, however, that a perusal of this volume has led us to the inevitable conclusion that this work will be utterly and entirely useless, except to the butterman; and even he must eschew it in leisure hours, and apply it strictly to the purposes of his commerce. If the writer's opinions were of little worth, his imagination was of even less possible appreciation. But in this volume he draws upon this imagination for his facts. We shall abundantly shew, in the course of this paper, that the falsifications of public and notorious state facts are so audacious, that even the epitome of an annual register cannot be accepted upon his authority. If this be so, even the humble utility of this writer's labours is gone. The first oddity that strikes us, however, is, that the author commences his history with a retrospect of all that he is going to tell. Apart from the usual condensation of the facts of about four years, the volume consists of that most valueless of all possible commodities, the opinions of Sir Archibald Alison. In the middle of 1819 he takes occasion to give one hundred closely-printed pages of his own estimate of all the poets, painters, novel-writers, actors, pamphleteers, and conversationists, who have flourished during the last quarter of a century. From Byron to Helen Faucit, from Fraser Tytler to Mr. Warren, from Dugald Stewart to Mr. James, from Grote to Lord Mahon, from Miss O'Neil to Mrs. Norton, from Mr. Thackeray to the great event of the establishment of "Blackwood's Magazine"-all these, and a hundred others, find their place in this history of the year 1819. As a matter of gallantry, we think we ought to protest that some of the ladies here mentioned were not born at the period when they are made to flourish; and as a matter of propriety, perhaps we ought to object to L. E. L., Mr. Warburton, and the author of " Eothen, being shut up together in one paragraph, and under one number. Inasmuch, however, as we cannot think that half a dozen people in all England will care to know what may be the author's opinion of Byron, Scott, Moore, Lingard, Hallam, or Macaulay; and inasmuch as it is probable that even that half dozen will not be very prone to take upon trust Sir Archibald Alison's estimate of his contemporary competitors of the pen (for the names we have first mentioned are no more competitors of Alison than Byron is a competitor of Tupper), we perhaps might have passed over these hundred pages without further comment. It may, however, furnish a moment's amusement to the reader to pursue the theme. Indeed the choice of occupants for the niches in Sir Archibald's Temple of Fame is too curious and amusing to be altogether unnoticed. We have among the Authors who flourished in the year 1819-who does the reader suppose? None other than Archdeacon Paley, who, if his tombstone is to be relied upon, died on the 25th of May 1805! In a list of great men which actually includes Mr. Warren, Monckton Milnes, and Mr. Swinton, a painter who "represents female elegance so well because by living with it he has learned in what it consists -we beg pardon of any lady to whom this may refer, for quoting so bungling a sentence, framed and conceived in such execrably bad taste-in a list so comprehensive and so little select, we are struck with the fact that Bishop Thirlwall finds no place among the Historians, Colonel Muir is unknown as a philologist, Faraday is not among the chemists, Mrs. Somerville is not among the writers on physical science, Murchison is not among the geologists, Owen is not among the naturalists, Godwin is not among the novelists or political writers, and Shelley is not among the poets! -Solvuntur tabulæ risu. Sir Archibald's ignorance of the classics is quite shocking: it makes one's face burn as we read him. When he tells us that " Mr. Mitford is the first who brought to the arduous task of Grecian history the extensive research and accurate inquiry which characterize the scholars of recent times," and that the same historian "sought every contemporary authority" (p. 473), we feel at once that the man who penned those sentences must be an ignorant man. Any one who has read Mitford, and is not an ignorant man, must have discovered at once, that whatever Mitford's merits may be, scholarship certainly is not one of them: if any doubt upon the subject remained, demonstrative proof might be obtained in the pages of Thirlwall, not only that Mitford was not the kind of historian imagined by Alison, but that he actually habitually read Greek through the medium of the Latin translations. Alison, however, as we have just seen, has never heard of Thirlwall! This only goes to our author's scholarship. We might, however, as well expect a thorough, acquaintance with La Place in an Oxford Undergraduate, taking up his six books for his "little go," as scholarship in Alison. Why, he hardly knows the rudiments of Latin. Often as he goes out of his way for a Latin or Greek quotation, displaying, with the ordinary ostentation of a very poor man, all the little bullion he possesses made up into rings and brooches, yet his books clearly shew that he is unacquainted with the ordinary rules of Latin prosody. At page 45 of this volume we find the following erudite quotation from the Latin Gram mar "The poet has said Dedicisse fideliter artes, Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros ;' and that is undoubtedly true. But observe, he has not said 'nee sinit esse pravos.' Every school-boy knows that Ovid wrote those lines Adde, quod, ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes, and a capital hexameter and pentameter they make. Alison begins by writing didicisse, "dedicisse," which exactly reverses the sense, and then bids his readers remark that the poet did not end the second line with ". "pravos.' Now if Ovid had wished to give the sense of "pravos" to the sentence, he would probably have used the word "malos :" he could never have said "prāvos," for this simple reasonit would have been an outrageous false quantity. On the other hand, if Alison had known a little Latin prosody he might have suggested "malos" and thus at least have rendered the suggestion possible. However, the limping dactyl he would put upon Ovid is not so bad as the Waterloo campaign he would have sketched out for Wellington. We apprehend that this author's writings must be full of these false quantities and other palpable evidences that the writer has not the ordinary scholarship of an educated gentleman. His complacent reference to his own Essays made us turn to the volume containing that upon the Fall of Rome; and the first thing that struck us was the following quotation, standing forth, not in the magazine article in The age of Pericles and Euripides immediately succeeded that of Themistocles: the genius of Cicero and Virgil illuminated the era which had witnessed the contests of Cæsar and Pompey. The era of Michael Angelo, Ariosto, and Tasso, threw a radiance over the expiring strife of the Crusades; of Bossuet, Molière, and Racine, over the declining glories of the Grand Monarque; that of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton, soon followed the fierce passions of the Reformation, &c. &c. Now we cheerfully admit that Bossuet, Molière, and Racine were contemporaries. They were all born within twenty years of each other, and they all lived in the reign of Louis XIV. But there was a lapse of forty-four years between the birth of Shakespeare and that of Milton. A man might almost as well speak of the era of Dryden and Mr. Dickens. What, however, shall we say of the era of Michael Angelo, Ariosto, and Tasso, and of the genius of these mighty men throwing a radiance over the expiring strife of the Crusades? The eighth Crusade took place in 1270, and the Christians were finally driven out of the Holy Land in 1291. Ariosto was born in 1417, Michael Angelo in 1474, and Tasso in 1544. Thus 126 years elapsed between the last spark of crusading strife and the birth of the first genius who threw a radiance over the expiring ashes. Moreover, there was an interval of one hundred and twenty-seven years between the birth of the first and the death of the last of the three men who are thus bracketted in one era. Is it possible that this "historian" could have believed that Ariosto, Michael Angelo, and Tasso were all contemporary men, and lived soon after 1270? We fear that this must be so: for the whole context shews that he is speaking of periods; and if he does not mean this, what in the name of Clio does he mean? This volume, however, is a volume of opinions, and to give our readers a notion of the book, we must produce some specimens of what these opinions are. First, it appears that the deliberate opinion of the historian is, that every newspaper which advocates free trade, or the payment of debts in money, is a portion of " a corrupted or hireling press." Perhaps Sir Archibald is of opinion that a good strict censorship in proper hands would set all things to rights, "without risk to either party." THE PRESS. It is generally supposed that the powers of thought, if allowed free expression, are the best guarantee against the encroachments of despotism; and that the loss of freedom is never to be apprehended as long as the liberty of the press is preserved But though that is often, it is by no means always, true; on the contrary, the selfish measures of class government, and the destruction of free privileges by military power, are never so effectually secured as by the support of a corrupted or hireling press. Beyond all question, the rude despotism of Cromwell in England, the nicely-constructed claims of imperial power in the hands of Napoleon in France, never could have existed, but for the cordial and interested support of an impassioned press in both countries. The utter ruin of the West-India colonies-the deep depression of agricultural industry in Great Britain and Ireland, in consequence of the Free-trade system-the general and longcontinued distress of the whole class of producers of both countries from the monetary laws-never could have been effected, if these measures had not been advocated by able and indefatigable journals in the interest of the monied class and the consumers. Those who lay the flattering unction to their souls that genius is the eternal enemy of oppression, and that liberty is safe if its expression is secured, would do well to look at the condition of Rome when every successive emperor was lauded in the eloquent strains of servile panegyrists; of England, when the mighty genius of Milton was devoted to defending the measures of the regicide and Long Parliament; or of France, when the sonorous periods of Fontaine celebrated, in graceful flattery, the despotism of Napoleon." The "historian" sees in the passing of the Reform Bill the ruin of England. The nation The nation will never get over the having given representatives to Manchester. The latter part of this extract may be taken as a specimen of the facts we have in this, and may expect in future volumes. Were we not right to withhold our recommendation of them as valuable for reference? GREAT BRITAIN RUINED BY THE REFORM BILL. But though that is the representative system, as it grew up in most of the states of modern Europe, and as it has produced the wonders of British greatness, it is not the representative system as it is now understood by the popular party all over the world. That system consists in the representation of mere numbers; in the vesting supreme power in the delegates of a simple majority of the whole population. The near approach made to such a system by the Reform Bill of Great Britain, gives, in its practical result, no countenance to the idea that such a system of government affords the best guarantee either for national security or social progress: on the contrary, it leads to the conclusion that its probable result is the selfishness and injustice of class government. Some one interest gets the majority, and it instantly makes use of its power to gain a profit to itself at the expense of every other class. Corporations, it is well known, have no consciences, for which proverbial fact an English Lord Chancellor has assigned a very sufficient reason; and the experience of the last twenty years of English legislation, affords too clear evidence that an interest vested with political power is not likely to be behind its neighbours in selfish aggrandisement. Certain it is, that the ruin of industry and destruction of property effected in Great Britain since the manufacturing school obtained the ascendancy in Parliament much exceeds any thing recorded in the history of pacific legislation, or that could have been effected by the most violent exertions of despotic power. Peel's Currency Bill may, however, dispute the honour of reducing us to our present sad state. CURRENCY BILL. In the interval the Act establishing cash payments by the Bank of England was passed; and with it a series of embarrassments began, national and social, financial and political, which have never yet been got over, and have imprinted lasting effects upon the fortunes of the British empire. The next extract is perhaps the most impudent defiance of notorious facts which has ever appeared in print-except, of course, in Alisonian articles in "Blackwood's Magazine." Immediately after the last Queen's Speech had been written by a Tory Government, and the last resolutions of the Houses of Lords and Commons had been dictated by a Protectionist party, Sir Archibald Alison puts forth the following bedlamite drivelling, and calls it history: THE EFFECTS OF FREE TRADE. Great and important as were these results of the social convulsions of France and England in the first instance, they sank into insignificance compared to those which followed the change in the commercial policy, and the increased stringency of the monetary laws of Great Britain. The effect of these all-important measures, from which so much was expected, and so little, save suffering, received, was to augment to an extraordinary and unparalleled degree the outward tendency of the British people. The agricultural population, especially in Ireland, were violently torn up from the land of their birth by woeful suffering; a famine of the thirteenth appeared amidst the population of the nineteenth century; and to this terrible, but transient, source of suffering was superadded the lasting discouragement arising from the virtual closing of the market of England to their produce, by the inundation of grain from foreign states. When the barriers raised by human regulations were thrown down, the eternal laws of nature appeared in full operation: the old and rich state can always undersell the young and poor one in manufactures, and is always undersold by it in agricultural produce. The fate of old Rome apparently was reserved for Great Britain; the harvests of Poland, the Ukraine, and America, began to prostrate agriculture in the British Isles as effectually as those of Sicily, Libya, and Egypt had done that of the old patrimony of the legions; and, after the lapse of eighteen hundred years, the same effects appeared. The great cities flourished, but the country decayed; the exportation of human beings, and the importation of human food, kept up a gainful traffic in the seaport towns; but it was every day more and more gliding into the hands of the foreigners; and while exports and imports were constantly increasing, the mainstay of national strength, the cultivation of the soil, was rapidly declining. The effects upon the strength, resources, and population of the empire, and the growth of its colonial possessions, were equally important. Europe, before the middle of the century, beheld with astonishment Great Britain, which, at the end of the war, had been self-supporting, importing ten millions of quarters of grain, being a full fifth of the national subsistence, and a constant stream of three hundred thousand emigrants annually leaving its shores. Its inhabitants, which for four centuries had been constantly increasing, declined a million in the five years from 1846 to 1850 in the two islands, and two millions in Ireland, taken separately; three millions of quarters of wheat ceased to be raised in the British Islands. Said we not rightly that this man's politics are but a bundle of crazy idiosyncracies? Such is the historian who proposes to write a history of the age of progress; such the man who offers to conduct us to a knowledge of that onward march of civilization which gave the rights of citizenship to Dissenters and Roman Catholics, abundant food to hungry mul titudes, free government to a class-ridden nation, commerce to an industrious people, an and the steam-engine to mankind. A mole honest currency to a commercial community, the revolutions of the stars, or a man blind from might as well pretend to write a treatise upon ton's discoveries in optics. his birth to indite a history of Sir Isaac New der should be properly appreciated. It was quite time that this pompous preten INDIA*-HOW THE HINDU THRALL IS RULED. Second Article. CORPORATIONS-especially trading corporations have a greater tendency towards corruption than amendment. Their abuses are their own. The reform of abuses generally comes from without, and is resisted when it comes. The case of the East-India Company is certainly no exception. From its origin that Company has proved itself to be the enemy of every natural right, and the refuge and protection of monopoly. Loud have been the complaints, and constant the resistance, which its policy has awakened during the two centuries of its operation; and occasionally its victims have been heard, and its opponents gratified with some small share of success. But in every instance the redress has been extorted, not yielded; and the unwilling surrender has never been made until it was impossible to delay it any longer. The policy of the India House is, opposition to all progress. When Lord North proposed in Parliament the first legislative measure for empowering the Crown to exercise some control over the selection of persons to be "Our Governors of Fort St. George, Fort William, and Bombay," he was met with the most determined opposition on the part of the Company, and the loss of that most just and necessary measure was all but accomplished. The Company opposed Mr. Fox's India Bill, and defeated it. They opposed Mr. Pitt's sub I. Parliamentary Return of "all Correspondence and Papers on the subject of Colonel Outram's removal from the office of Resident at the Court of Guicowar, or on the subject of the alleged corruption of officers of the Bombay Government with bribes from Baroda," 1852. II. Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Indian Territories," 1852. III. Notes and Opinions of a Native, on the present state of India. [Written by Mir Shahamut Ali, and published by Butler, Ryde, Isle of Wight.] IV. Remarks on the affairs of India, with observations on some of the evidence given before the Parliamentary Committees. By John Sullivan, Esq. Effingham Wilson, 1852. stituted Bill, but were in their turn defeated. Always jealous of any extension of the trade of India, because they feared to let in the tide of European intelligence upon the dark places of their Asiatic despotism, they opposed even the scanty concession made by the Liverpool administration in 1813, when, under very great and impolitic restrictions, some right to trade with India, and at the capital cities of the Presidencies, was first given to British subjects. In 1833, they opposed the trivial concessions of the present Charter-Act. They contended that the trade with India ought not to be carried on except under their auspices and for their profit; they denounced the China trade as a scandalous interference with their misused monopoly; and they complained of the admission of uncovenanted English colonists into the Mofussil, as an encroachment fraught with peril to the secret policy of their government. In 1852 they take their stand upon the same Act, and protest against every proposal to correct its more glaring anomalies, or to supply any one of its proved defects. They have at least the merit of consistency. As it was in the beginning, their cry is now, and ever shall be, "No innovation!" Consistency is not their only virtue. Their harmony is equally undeniable. Quot homines, tot sententiæ is not true of the India House. There the happiest understanding prevails. The Court of Directors are of one heart and one mind. Elsewhere, indeed, the members of the Court may have their little differences. At Westminster, Sir James Weir Hogg may play the Peelite, Mr. Plowden the Protecthe Radical; but Leadenhall Street ignores all tionist, Mr. Loch the Whig, and Mr. Mangles dangerous distinctions. There, at least, they do agree, and their unanimity is wonderful. They dispense their own patronage, they repel They know their course, and they pursue it. the scrutiny of the curious, and they stand by their own government, right or wrong. Not |