Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1

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CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS

VOLUME 1

by THOMAS BABBINGTON MACAULAY

CONTENTS OF VOL. 1

ENGLISH HISTORY

EDITOR'S NOTE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
HALLAM'S HISTORY
BURLEIGH AND HIS TIMES
JOHN HAMPDEN
MILTON
SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE
SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH
HORACE WALPOLE
WILLIAM PITT
THE EARL OF CHATHAM
CLIVE
WARREN HASTINGS
LORD HOLLAND
INDEX

EDITOR'S NOTE

By

AJ Grieve

A French student of English letters (M. Paul Oursel) has written
the following lines:

"Depuis deux siecles les Essais forment une branche importante de
la litterature anglaise; pour designer un ecrivain de cette
classe, nos voisons emploient un mot qui n'a pas d'equivalent en
francais; ils disent: un essayist. Qu'est-ce qu'un essayist?
L'essayist se distingue du moraliste, de l'historien, du critique
litteraire, du biographe, de l'ecrivain politique; et pourtant il
emprunte quelque trait a chacun d'eux; il ressemble tour a tour a
l'un ou a l'autre; il est aussi philosophe, il est satirique,
humoriste a ses heures; il reunit en sa personne des qualities
multiples; il offre dans ses ecrits un specimen de tous les
genres. On voit qu'il n'est pas facile de definir l'essayist;
mais l'exemple suppleera a la definition. On connaitra exactement
le sens du mot quand on aura etudie l'ecrivain qui, d'apres le
jugement de ces compatriotes, est l'essayist par excellence, ou,
comme on disait dans les anciens cours de litterature, le Prince
des essayists."

Macaulay is indeed the prince of essayists, and his reign is
unchallenged. "I still think--says Professor Saintsbury (Corrected
Impressions, p. 89 f.)--that on any subject which Macaulay has
touched, his survey is unsurpassable for giving a first bird's-
eye view, and for creating interest in the matter. . . . And he
certainly has not his equal anywhere for covering his subject in
the pointing-stick fashion. You need not--you had much better
not--pin your faith on his details, but his Pisgah sights are
admirable. Hole after hole has been picked in the "Clive" and the
"Hastings," the "Johnson" and the "Addison," the "Frederick" and
the "Horace Walpole," yet every one of these papers contains
sketches, summaries, precis, which have not been made obsolete or
valueless by all the work of correction in detail."

Two other appreciations from among the mass of critical
literature that has accumulated round Macaulay's work may be
fitly cited, This from Mr. Frederic Harrison:-

"How many men has Macaulay succeeded in reaching, to whom all
other history and criticism is a sealed book, or a book in an
unknown tongue! If he were a sciolist or a wrongheaded fanatic,
this would be a serious evil. But, as he is substantially right
in his judgments, brimful of saying common-sense and generous
feeling, and profoundly well read in his own periods and his
favourite literature, Macaulay has conferred most memorable
services on the readers of English throughout the world. He
stands between philosophic historians and the public very much as
journals and periodicals stand between the masses and great
libraries. Macaulay is a glorified journalist and reviewer, who
brings the matured results of scholars to the man in the street
in a form that he can remember and enjoy, when he could not make
use of a merely learned book. He performs the office of the
ballad-maker or story-teller in an age before books were known or
were common. And it is largely due to his influence that the best
journals and periodicals of our day are written in a style so
clear, so direct, so resonant."

And this from Mr. Cotter Morison

"Macaulay did for the historical essay what Haydn did for the
sonata, and Watt for the steam engine; he found it rudimentary
and unimportant, and left it complete and a thing of power. . . .
To take a bright period or personage of history, to frame it in a
firm outline, to conceive it at once in article-size, and then to
fill in this limited canvas with sparkling anecdote, telling bits
of colour, and facts, all fused together by a real genius for
narrative, was the sort of genre-painting which Macaulay applied
to history. . . . And to this day his essays remain the best of
their class, not only in England, but in Europe. . . . The best
would adorn any literature, and even the less successful have a
picturesque animation, and convey an impression of power that
will not easily be matched. And, again, we need to bear in mind
that they were the productions of a writer immersed in business,
written in his scanty moments of leisure, when most men would
have rested or sought recreation. Macaulay himself was most
modest in his estimate of their value. . . . It was the public
that insisted on their re-issue, and few would be bold enough to
deny that the public was right."

It is to Mr. Morison that the plan followed in the present
edition of the Essays is due. In his monograph on Macaulay
(English Men of Letters series) he devotes a chapter to the
Essays and "with the object of giving as much unity as possible
to a subject necessarily wanting it," classifies the Essays into
four groups, (1)English history, (2)Foreign history,
(3)Controversial, (4)Critical and Miscellaneous. The articles in
the first group are equal in bulk to those of the three other
groups put together, and are contained in the first volume of
this issue. They form a fairly complete survey of English
history from the time of Elizabeth to the later years of the
reign of George III, and are fitly introduced by the Essay on
Hallam's History, which forms a kind of summary or microcosm of
the whole period.

The scheme might be made still more complete by including certain
articles (and especially the exquisite biographies contributed by
Macaulay to the Encyclopaedia Britannica) which are published in
the volume of "Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches." Exigencies
of space have, however, compelled the limitation of the present
edition to the "Essays" usually so-called. These have also been
reprinted in the chronological arrangement ordinarily followed
(see below) in The Temple Classics (5 vols. 1900), where an
exhaustive bibliography, etc., has been appended to each Essay.

Chief dates in the life of Thomas Babington Macaulay, afterwards Baron
Macaulay:--

1800 (Oct. 25). Birth at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire.
1818-1825. Life at Cambridge (Fellow of Trinity, 1824).
1825. Essay on Milton contributed to Edinburgh Review.
1826. Joined the Northern Circuit.
1830 @M.P. for Calne (gift of the Marquis of Lansdowne).
1833. M.P. for Leeds.
1834-38. Legal Adviser to the Supreme Council of India. Work at
the Indian Penal Code.
1839. M.P. for Edinburgh, and Secretary at War In Melbourne's
Cabinet.
1842. Lays of Ancient Rome.
1843. Collected edition of the Essays.
1847. Rejected at the Election of M.P. for Edinburgh.
1848. England from the Accession of James II. vols.
i. and ii.
1852. M.P. for Edinburgh; serious illness.
1855. History of England, vols. iii. and iv.
1857. Raised to the peerage.
1859 (Dec. 28). Death at Holly Lodge, Kensington. (Buried in
Westminster Abbey, 9th January 1860.)

The following are the works of Thomas Babington Macaulay:

Pompeii (Prize poem), 1819; Evening (prize poem), 1821; Lays of
Ancient Rome (1842); Ivry and the Armada (Quarterly Magazine),
added to Edition of 1848; Critical and Historical Essays
(Edinburgh Review), 1843.

The Essays originally appeared as follows:

Milton, August 1825; Machiavelli, March 1827; Hallam's
"Constitutional History," September 1828; Southey's "Colloquies,"
January 1830; R. Montgomery's Poems, April 1830; Civil
Disabilities of Jews, January 1831; Byron, June 1831; Croker's
"Boswell," September 1831; Pilgrim's Progress, December 1831;
Hampden, December 1831; Burleigh, April 1832; War of Succession
in Spain, January 1833; Horace Walpole, October 1833; Lord
Chatham, January 1834; Mackintosh's "History of Revolution," July
1835; Bacon, July 1837; Sir William Temple, October 1838;
"Gladstone on Church and State," April 1839; Clive, January 1840;
Ranke's "History of the Popes," October 1840; Comic Dramatists,
January 1841; Lord Holland, July 1841; Warren Hastings, October
1841; Frederick the Great, April 1842; Madame D'Arblay, January
1843; Addison, July 1843; Lord Chatham (2nd Art.), October 1844.

History of England, vols. i. and ii., 1848; vols. iii. and iv.,
1855; vol. v., Ed. Lady Trevelyan, 1861; Ed. 8 vols., 1858-62
(Life by Dean Milman); Ed. 4 vols., People's Edition, with Life
by Dean Milman, 1863-4; Inaugural Address (Glasgow), 1849;
Speeches corrected by himself, 1854 (unauthorized version, 1853,
by Vizetelly); Miscellaneous Writings, 2 vols. 1860 (Ed. T. F.
Ellis). These include poems, lives (Encyclo. Britt. 8th ed.), and
contributions to Quarterly Magazine, and the following from
Edinburgh Review:

Dryden, January 1828; History, May 1828; Mill on Government,
March 1829; Westminster Reviewer's Defence of Mill, June 1829;
Utilitarian Theory of Government, October 1829; Sadler's "Law of
Population," July 1830; Sadler's "Refutation Refuted," January
1831 Mirabeau, July 1832; Barere, April 1844.

Complete Works (Ed. Lady Trevelyan), 8 vols., 1866.

BOOKS OF REFERENCE

Sir G.0. Trevelyan: The Life and Letters Of Lord Macaulay (2
vols. 8vo., 1876, 2nd ed. with additions, 1877, subsequent
editions 1878 and 1881).

J. Cotter Morison: Macaulay [English Men of Letters], (1882).

Mark Pattison: Art. "Macaulay" in Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Leslie Stephen: Hours in a Library [new ed. 1892], ii. 243-376.
Art. "Macaulay" in Dictionary of National Biography.

Frederic Harrison: Macaulay's Place in Literature (1894).
Studies in Early Victorian Literature, chap. iii. (1895).

G. Saintsbury: Corrected Impressions, chaps. ix. x. (189,5).
A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, pp. 224-232 (1896).

P. Oursel: Les Essais de Lord Macaulay (1882).

D.H. Macgregor: Lord Macaulay (1901).

Sir R.C. Jebb: Macaulay (1900).

F.C. Montague. Macaulay's Essays (3 vols. 1901).

A. J. G. August 1907.

HALLAM
(September 1828)

The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of
Henry VII. to the Death of George II. By HENRY HALLAM. In 2 vols.
1827

History, at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound
of poetry and philosophy. It impresses general truths on the mind
by a vivid representation of particular characters and incidents.
But, in fact, the two hostile elements of which it consists have
never been known to form a perfect amalgamation; and at length,
in our own time, they have been completely and professedly
separated. Good histories, in the proper sense of the word, we
have not. But we have good historical romances, and good
historical essays. The imagination and the reason, if we may use
a legal metaphor, have made partition of a province of literature
of which they were formerly seized per my et per tout; and now
they hold their respective portions in severalty, instead of
holding the whole in common.

To make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us
in the society of a great man or on the eminence which overlooks
the field of a mighty battle, to invest with the reality of human
flesh and blood beings whom we are too much inclined to consider
as personified qualities in an allegory, to call up our ancestors
before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and
garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables,
to rummage their old-fashioned ward-robes, to explain the uses of
their ponderous furniture, these parts of the duty which properly
belongs to the historian have been appropriated by the historical
novelist. On the other hand, to extract the philosophy of
history, to direct on judgment of events and men, to trace the
connection of cause and effects, and to draw from the occurrences
of former time general lessons of moral and political wisdom, has
become the business of a distinct class of writers.

Of the two kinds of composition into which history has been thus
divided, the one may be compared to a map, the other to a painted
landscape. The picture, though it places the country before us,
does not enable us to ascertain with accuracy the dimensions, the
distances, and the angles. The map is not a work of imitative
art. It presents no scene to the imagination; but it gives us
exact information as to the bearings of the various points, and
is a more useful companion to the traveller or the general than
the painted landscape could be, though it were the grandest that
ever Rosa peopled with outlaws, or the sweetest over which Claude
ever poured the mellow effulgence of a setting sun.

It is remarkable that the practice of separating the two
ingredients of which history is composed has become prevalent on
the Continent as well as in this country. Italy has already
produced a historical novel, of high merit and of still higher
promise. In France, the practice has been carried to a length
somewhat whimsical. M. Sismondi publishes a grave and stately
history of the Merovingian Kings, very valuable, and a little
tedious. He then sends forth as a companion to it a novel, in
which he attempts to give a lively representation of characters
and manners. This course, as it seems to us, has all the
disadvantages of a division of labour, and none of its
advantages. We understand the expediency of keeping the functions
of cook and coachman distinct. The dinner will be better dressed,
and the horses better managed. But where the two situations are
united, as in the Maitre Jacques of Moliere, we do not see that
the matter is much mended by the solemn form with which the
pluralist passes from one of his employments to the other.

We manage these things better in England. Sir Walter Scott gives
us a novel; Mr. Hallam a critical and argumentative history. Both
are occupied with the same matter. But the former looks at it
with the eye of a sculptor. His intention is to give an express
and lively image of its external form. The latter is an
anatomist. His task is to dissect the subject to its inmost
recesses, and to lay bare before us all the springs of motion and
all the causes of decay.

Mr. Hallam is, on the whole, far better qualified than any other
writer of our time for the office which he has undertaken. He has
great industry and great acuteness. His knowledge is extensive,
various, and profound. His mind is equally distinguished by the
amplitude of its grasp, and by the delicacy of its tact. His
speculations have none of that vagueness which is the common
fault of political philosophy. On the contrary, they are
strikingly practical, and teach us not only the general rule, but
the mode of applying it to solve particular cases. In this
respect they often remind us of the Discourses of Machiavelli.

The style is sometimes open to the charge of harshness. We have
also here and there remarked a little of that unpleasant trick,
which Gibbon brought into fashion, the trick, we mean, of telling
a story by implication and allusion. Mr. Hallam however, has an
excuse which Gibbon had not. His work is designed for readers who
are already acquainted with the ordinary books on English
history, and who can therefore unriddle these little enigmas
without difficulty. The manner of the book is, on the whole, not
unworthy of the matter. The language, even where most faulty, is
weighty and massive, and indicates strong sense in every line. It
often rises to an eloquence, not florid or impassioned, but high,
grave, and sober; such as would become a state paper, or a
judgment delivered by a great magistrate, a Somers or a
D'Aguesseau.

In this respect the character of Mr. Hallam's mind corresponds
strikingly with that of his style. His work is eminently
judicial. Its whole spirit is that of the bench, not that of the
bar. He sums up with a calm, steady impartiality, turning neither
to the right nor to the left, glossing over nothing, exaggerating
nothing, while the advocates on both sides are alternately biting
their lips to hear their conflicting misstatements and sophisms
exposed. On a general survey, we do not scruple to pronounce the
Constitutional History the most impartial book that we ever read.
We think it the more incumbent on us to bear this testimony
strongly at first setting out, because, in the course of our
remarks, we shall think it right to dwell principally on those
parts of it from which we dissent.

There is one peculiarity about Mr. Hallam which, while it adds to
the value of his writings, will, we fear, take away something
from their popularity. He is less of a worshipper than any
historian whom we can call to mind. Every political sect has its
esoteric and its exoteric school, its abstract doctrines for the
initiated, its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its
mythological fables for the vulgar. It assists the devotion of
those who are unable to raise themselves to the contemplation of
pure truth by all the devices of Pagan or Papal superstition. It
has its altars and its deified heroes, its relics and
pilgrimages, its canonized martyrs and confessors, its festivals
and its legendary miracles. Our pious ancestors, we are told,
deserted the High Altar of Canterbury, to lay all their oblations
on the shrine of St. Thomas. In the same manner the great and
comfortable doctrines of the Tory creed, those particularly which
relate to restrictions on worship and on trade, are adored by
squires and rectors in Pitt Clubs, under the name of a minister
who was as bad a representative of the system which has been
christened after him as Becket of the spirit of the Gospel. On
the other hand, the cause for which Hampden bled on the field and
Sidney on the scaffold is enthusiastically toasted by many an
honest radical who would be puzzled to explain the difference
between Ship-money and the Habeas Corpus Act. It may be added
that, as in religion, so in politics, few even of those who are
enlightened enough to comprehend the meaning latent under the
emblems of their faith can resist the contagion of the popular
superstition. Often, when they flatter themselves that they are
merely feigning a compliance with the prejudices of the vulgar,
they are themselves under the influence of those very prejudices.
It probably was not altogether on grounds of expediency that
Socrates taught his followers to honour the gods whom the state
honoured, and bequeathed a cock to Esculapius with his dying
breath. So there is often a portion of willing credulity and
enthusiasm in the veneration which the most discerning men pay to
their political idols. From the very nature of man it must be so.
The faculty by which we inseparably associate ideas which have
often been presented to us in conjunction is not under the
absolute control of the will. It may be quickened into morbid
activity. It may be reasoned into sluggishness. But in a certain
degree it will always exist. The almost absolute mastery which
Mr. Hallam has obtained over feelings of this class is perfectly
astonishing to us, and will, we believe, be not only astonishing
but offensive to many of his readers. It must particularly
disgust those people who, in their speculations on politics, are
not reasoners but fanciers; whose opinions, even when sincere,
are not produced, according to the ordinary law of intellectual
births, by induction or inference, but are equivocally generated
by the heat of fervid tempers out of the overflowing of tumid
imaginations. A man of this class is always in extremes. He
cannot be a friend to liberty without calling for a community of
goods, or a friend to order without taking under his protection
the foulest excesses of tyranny. His admiration oscillates
between the most worthless of rebels and the most worthless of
oppressors, between Marten, the disgrace of the High Court of
justice, and Laud, the disgrace of the Star-Chamber. He can
forgive anything but temperance and impartiality. He has a
certain sympathy with the violence of his opponents, as well as
with that of his associates. In every furious partisan he sees
either his present self or his former self, the pensioner that
is, or the Jacobin that has been. But he is unable to comprehend
a writer who, steadily attached to principles, is indifferent
about names and badges, and who judges of characters with equable
severity, not altogether untinctured with cynicism, but free from
the slightest touch of passion, party spirit, or caprice.

We should probably like Mr. Hallam's book more if, instead of
pointing out with strict fidelity the bright points and the dark
spots of both parties, he had exerted himself to whitewash the
one and to blacken the other. But we should certainly prize it
far less. Eulogy and invective may be had for the asking. But for
cold rigid justice, the one weight and the one measure, we know
not where else we can look.

No portion of our annals has been more perplexed and
misrepresented by writers of different parties than the history
of the Reformation. In this labyrinth of falsehood and
sophistry, the guidance of Mr. Hallam is peculiarly valuable. It
is impossible not to admire the even-handed justice with which he
deals out castigation to right and left on the rival persecutors.

It is vehemently maintained by some writers of the present day
that Elizabeth persecuted neither Papists nor Puritans as such,
and that the severe measures which she occasionally adopted were
dictated, not by religious intolerance, but by political
necessity. Even the excellent account of those times which Mr.
Hallam has given has not altogether imposed silence on the
authors of this fallacy. The title of the Queen, they say, was
annulled by the Pope; her throne was given to another; her
subjects were incited to rebellion; her life was menaced; every
Catholic was bound in conscience to be a traitor; it was
therefore against traitors, not against Catholics, that the penal
laws were enacted.

In order that our readers may be fully competent to appreciate
the merits of this defence, we will state, as concisely as
possible, the substance of some of these laws.

As soon as Elizabeth ascended the throne, and before the least
hostility to her government had been shown by the Catholic
population, an act passed prohibiting the celebration of the
rites of the Romish Church on pain of forfeiture for the first
offence, of a year's imprisonment for the second, and of
perpetual imprisonment for the third.

A law was next made in 1562, enacting, that all who had ever
graduated at the Universities or received holy orders, all
lawyers, and all magistrates, should take the oath of supremacy
when tendered to them, on pain of forfeiture and imprisonment
during the royal pleasure. After the lapse of three mouths, the
oath might again be tendered to them; and if it were again
refused, the recusant was guilty of high treason. A prospective
law, however severe, framed to exclude Catholics from the liberal
professions, would have been mercy itself compared with this
odious act. It is a retrospective statute; it is a retrospective
penal statute; it is a retrospective penal statute against a
large class. We will not positively affirm that a law of this
description must always, and under all circumstances, be
unjustifiable. But the presumption against it is most violent;
nor do we remember any crisis either in our own history, or in
the history of any other country, which would have rendered such
a provision necessary. In the present case, what circumstances
called for extraordinary rigour? There might be disaffection
among the Catholics. The prohibition of their worship would
naturally produce it. But it is from their situation, not from
their conduct, from the wrongs which they had suffered, not from
those which they had committed, that the existence of discontent
among them must be inferred. There were libels, no doubt, and
prophecies, and rumours and suspicions, strange grounds for a law
inflicting capital penalties, ex post facto, on a large body of
men.

Eight years later, the bull of Pius deposing Elizabeth produced a
third law. This law, to which alone, as we conceive, the defence
now under our consideration can apply, provides that, if any
Catholic shall convert a Protestant to the Romish Church, they
shall both suffer death as for high treason.

We believe that we might safely content ourselves with stating
the fact, and leaving it to the judgment of every plain
Englishman. Recent controversies have, however, given so much
importance to this subject, that we will offer a few remarks on
it.

In the first place, the arguments which are urged in favour of
Elizabeth apply with much greater force to the case of her sister
Mary. The Catholics did not, at the time of Elizabeth's
accession, rise in arms to seat a Pretender on her throne. But
before Mary had given, or could give, provocation, the most
distinguished Protestants attempted to set aside her rights in
favour of the Lady Jane. That attempt, and the subsequent
insurrection of Wyatt, furnished at least as good a plea for the
burning of Protestants, as the conspiracies against Elizabeth
furnish for the hanging and embowelling of Papists.