HALLAM.

HENRY HALLAM. Born 1778; Died 1859.

The three great works of Hallam, The View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, The Constitutional History of England, and The View of European Literature, have raised him to the first order of English historians. He belonged neither to the colder and more academic style usual in the previous century, nor to the school of historical partizans; but is especially distinguished by the judicial and impartial spirit which, united to sound learning and careful research, he brings to the judgment of historical questions.

THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION.

It was in the turn of feeling, in the change, if I may so say, of the heart, far more than in any positive statutes and improvements of the law, that I consider the Revolution to have been eminently conducive to our freedom and prosperity. Laws and statutes as remedial, nay, more closely limiting the prerogative than the Bill of Rights and Act of Settlement, might possibly have been obtained from James himself, as the price of his continuance on the throne, or from his family as that of their restoration to it. But what the Revolution did for us was this: it broke a spell that had charmed the nation. It cut up by the roots all that theory of indefeasible rights, of paramount prerogative, which had put the crown in continual opposition to the people. A contention had now subsisted for five hundred years,

but particularly during the last four reigns, against the aggressions of arbitrary power. The sovereigns of this country had never patiently endured the control of parliament; nor was it natural for them to do so, while the two Houses of Parliament appeared historically, and in legal language, to derive their existence as well as privileges from the crown itself. They had at their side the pliant lawyers, who held the prerogative to be uncontrollable by statutes, a doctrine of itself destructive to any scheme of reconciliation and compromise between the king and his subjects; they had the churchmen, whose casuistry denied that the most intolerable tyranny could excuse resistance to a lawful government. These two propositions could not obtain general acceptation without rendering all national liberty precarious.

It has been always reckoned among the most difficult problems in the practical science of government to combine an hereditary monarchy with security of freedom, so that neither the ambition of kings shall undermine the people's rights, nor the jealousy of the people overturn the throne. England had already experience of both these mischiefs. And there seemed no prospect before her, but either their alternate recurrence, or a final submission to absolute power, unless by one great effort she could put the monarchy for ever beneath the law, and reduce it to an integrant portion instead of the primary source and principle of the constitution. She must reverse the favoured maxim, "A deo rex, છે rege lex;" and make the crown itself appear the crea

ture of the law. But our ancient monarchy, strong in a possession of seven centuries, and in those high and paramount prerogatives which the consenting testimony of lawyers and the submission of parliaments had recognised, a monarchy from which the House of Commons and every existing peer, though not perhaps the aristocratic order itself, derived its participation in the legislature, could not be bent to the republican theories which have been not very successfully attempted in some modern codes of constitution. It could not be held, without breaking up all the foundations of our policy, that the monarchy emanated from the parliament,

or, in any historical sense, from the people. But by

the Revolution, and by the Act of Settlement, the rights of the actual monarch, of the reigning family, were made to emanate from the parliament and the people. In technical language, in the grave and respectful theory of our constitution, the crown is still the fountain from which law and justice spring forth. Its prerogatives are in the main the same as under the Tudors and the Stuarts: but the right of the House of Brunswick to exercise them can only be deduced from the Convention of 1688.

The great advantage, therefore, of the Revolution, as I would especially affirm, consists in that which was reckoned its reproach by many, and its misfortune by more, that it broke the line of succession. No other remedy could have been found, according to the temper and prejudices of those times, against the unceasing conspiracy of power. But when the very tenure of

power was conditional, when the crown, as we may say, gave recognizances for its good behaviour, when any violent and concerted aggressions on public liberty would have ruined those who could only resist an inveterate faction by the arms which liberty put in their hands, the several parts of the constitution were kept in cohesion by a tie far stronger than statutes—that of a common interest in its preservation. The attachment of James to Popery, his infatuation, his obstinacy, his pusillanimity, nay, even the death of the Duke of Gloucester, the life of the Prince of Wales, the extraordinary permanence and fidelity of his party, were all the destined means through which our present grandeur and liberty, our dignity of thinking on matters of government, have been perfected. Those liberal tenets, which at the era of the Revolution were maintained but by one denomination of English party, and rather perhaps on authority of not very good precedents in our history, than of sound general reasoning, became in the course of the next generation almost equally the creed of the other whose long exclusion from government taught them to solicit the people's favour and by the time that Jacobitism was extinguished, had passed into received maxims of English politics.

MACAULAY.

THOMAS BABINGTON, LORD MACAULAY. Born 1800; Died 1859. Distinguished as a statesman, as an orator, and as an essayist; but above all as a historian. His History of England, after a preliminary sketch of the earlier period, deals more in detail with the events that led up to, and those that followed, the Revolution of 1688. The chief character, and we might almost say the hero, of the book, is William III.; but the history was interrupted by the author's death before the account of William's reign had been brought to a conclusion. In brilliancy of illustration, in graphic description, and in charm of style, Macaulay has never been surpassed.

THE LAST DAYS OF ARGYLE.

AND now commenced the brightest part of Argyle's career. His enterprise had hitherto brought on him nothing but reproach and derision. His great error was that he did not resolutely refuse to accept the name without the power of a general. Had he remained quietly at his retreat in Friesland, he would in a few years have been recalled with honour to his country, and would have been conspicuous among the ornaments and the props of constitutional monarchy. Had he conducted his expedition according to his own. views, and carried with him no followers but such as were prepared implicitly to obey all his orders, he might possibly have effected something great. For what he wanted as a captain seems to have been, not courage,