Two more volumes of Macaulay's History have appeared after a seven years' respite, and have been received with an ardour which will be memorable in the Row. When the public hear of the number of copies sold, they should remember that, as compared with "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or with a single number of Mr. Dickens's serials, it is thirty-six shillings to one against Mr. Macaulay. Moreover, it is history, which few can estimate thoroughly as compared with fiction, which all can enjoy. It is the past versus the present the unknown or forgotten, in contrast with the obvious, the direct, and the familiar. We can best appreciate the value of a literary name by such evidence as this of its conjuring capacity. Fifty or sixty thousand volumes out of one study; it is like the numberless bouquets out of Mr. Anderson's hat, only their multiplication is the work of a more mysterious agency, and of a more subtle influence-the magic fecundity of a popular fame.

Mr. Macaulay's products, when received by his audience, are found, equally with the Wizard's, to be expanded specimens. His two volumes, of 1,600 pages combined, contain the history of about eight years-from the accession of William and Mary to the Peace of Ryswick. Nearly eight years of a fuller century have been consumed in telling what eight years of a comparatively meagre one produced. It has been justly observed, elsewhere, that this is disappointing; that it marks the vanity of human promises, and the hopelessness of endeavour; that time is swifter than the coursers of the blue and buff chariot-man, and is clutching at the laurels of the Phaethon of Scotch "Reviewers."

Doubts have even arisen as to whether his production is a history at all-whether it be not a poem unrhymed—a Bataviad," as we find it elsewhere lightly designated. Poem or not, it is quite as entertaining in its later cantos as it was in its first. Hypercritical people mutter faint disappointment; but the truth is, that this time they knew what to look for. They had no longer the same attraction of unused expectation to draw them on to the last page of the easy-going narrative. In their satisfied mood, the reaction of their idol-worship

has set in. They begin to see the clay supporting the brass, and the brass alloying the contiguous gold. But whatever defects-and they are many-may be detected now, the cavillers must admit that a great work remains -a work creditable to the age, more admirable than anything of a like kind in contemporary literature, and as entertaining (we must here change the term of comparison) as any historical work which has ever preceded it.

Regarded as a poem, it possesses great merit; for it contains a single predominant hero. The interest of the story is skilfully sustained, and concentrated about the person of William the Third. William, in the former volumes, obtained a crown by stepping in boldly at a national emergency; but in these he has to maintain it against all comers, and against all his enemies, secret or avowed. Hitherto he had only secured the soil of England. Scotland was doubtful; Edinburgh Castle held out; and he had yet to try the mettle of the robust Highlanders. Ireland, moreover, was the stronghold of his foe; and his partisans barely retained a corner in which they stood at bay for their all. William had to conquer peace for them and for himself within his nominal dominions; and he had to achieve this exploit with unreliable instruments. The Tories, in correspondence with St. Germains, were plotting treasons against his life and throne, while Whigs were outbidding these plotters for a Restoration, by adding to their Jacobite treasons political perfidy. The one party in the interest of its convictions, and the other of its cowardice, surrounded William alternately with ruffians or rascals; and he had to make his way through this entourage to his immediate work-the pacification of Scotland and conquest of Ireland; and, when these feats were accomplished, he had the heavier labour of settling a new dynasty in security, and of restoring England to her place among European nations. In other words, he had to reform the English Constitution; to re-establish its principles; to develope our national resources, to bring them into action, and to combine them with discordant elements; to curb the ambition of France, and to humble its Grande Monarche.

From many illustrations of his Scottish difficulties, we extract the following description of the Highlanders:

In the reign of George the First, a work was pub lished which professed to give a most exact account of Scotland; and in this work, consisting of more than three hundred pages, two contemptuous paragraphs were thought sufficient for the Highlands and the Highlanders. We may well doubt whether, in 1689, one in twenty of the well-read gentlemen who assembled at Will's coffeehouse knew that, within the four seas, and at the distance of less than five hundred miles from London, were many miniature courts, in each of which a petty prince, attended by guards, by armourbearers, by musicians, by a hereditary orator, by a hereditary poet laureate, kept a rude state, dispensed a rude justice, waged wars, and concluded treaties. While the old Gaelic institutions were in full vigour, no account of them was given by any observer qualified to judge of them fairly. Had such an observer studied the character of the Highlanders, he would doubtless have found in it closely intermingled the good and the bad qualities of an uncivilized nation. He would have found that the people had no love for their country or for their king; that they had no attachment to any commonwealth larger than the clan, or to any magistrate superior to the chief. He would have found that life was governed by a code of morality and honour onour widely different from that which is established in peaceful and prosperous societies. He would have learned that a stab in the back, or a shot from behind a fragment of rock, were approved modes of taking satisfaction for insults. He would have heard men relate boastfully how they or their fathers had wreaked on hereditary enemies in a neighbouring valley such vengeance as would have made old soldiers of the Thirty Years' War shudder. He would have found that robbery was held to be a calling, not merely innocent, but honourable. He would have seen, wherever he turned, that dislike of steady industry, and that disposition to throw on the weaker sex the heaviest part of manual labour, which are characteristic of savages. He would have been struck by the spectacle of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon, or taking aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their pregnant wives, their tender daughters, were reaping the scanty harvest of oats. Nor did the women repine at their hard lot. In their view it was quite fit that a man, especially if he assumed the aristocratic title of Duinhe Wassel, and adorned his bonnet with the eagle's feather, should take his ease, except when he was fighting, hunting, or marauding. To mention the name of such a man in connexion with commerce or with any mechanical art was an insult. Agriculture was, indeed, less despised. Yet a highborn warrior was much more becomingly employed in plundering the land of others than in tilling his

own.

The religion of the greater part of the Highlands was a rude mixture of Popery and Paganism. The symbol of redemption was associated with heathen sacrifices and incantations. Baptized men poured libations of ale to one Dæmon, and set out drink-offerings of milk to another. Seers wrapped themselves up in bulls' hides, and awaited, in that vesture, the inspiration which was to reveal the future. Even among those minstrels and genealogists whose hereditary vocation was to preserve the memory of past events, an inquirer would have found very few who could read. In truth, he might easily have journeyed from sea to sea without discovering a page of Gaelic printed or written. The price which he would have had to pay for his knowledge of the country would have been heavy. He would have had to endure hardships as

great as if he had sojourned among the Esquimaux or of some great lord who had a seat in the Parliament the Samoyeds. Here and there, indeed, at the castle and Privy Council, and who was accustomed to pass a large part of his life in the cities of the South, might have been found wigs and embroidered coats, plate and fine linen, lace and jewels, French dishes and French wines. But, in general, the traveller would have been forced to content himself with very different quarters. In many dwellings the furniture, the food, the clothing, nay, the very hair and skin of his hosts, would have put his philosophy to the proof. His lodging would sometimes have been in a hut of which every nook would have swarmed with vermin. He would have inhaled an atmosphere thick with peat smoke, and foul with a hundred noisome exhalations. At supper grain fit

only for horses would have been set before him, accompanied by a cake of blood drawn from living cows. Some of the company with which he would have feasted would have been covered with cutaneous eruptions, and others would have been smeared with tar like sheep. His couch would have been the bare earth, dry or wet as the weather might be; and from that couch he would have risen half poisoned with stench, half blind with the reek of turf, and half mad with the itch.

To what a state Ireland was at the same time reduced by its priests and Rapparees, and what fate was in store for the Protestant supporters of William, may be inferred from the universal arming of the one party, and the compulsory disarmament of nearly all the latter. On a certain day, every Protestant was required to give up his weapons, under a threat that, if he failed to comply, his house should be sacked by the ruffians who were by courtesy termed soldiers. To what excesses this led, and what anarchy and even desolation prevailed in the island, the following statement will partly illus

trate:

not

The destruction of property which took place within a few weeks would be incredible, if it were attested by witnesses unconnected with each other, and attached to very different interests. There is a close, and sometimes almost a verbal, agreement between the descriptions given by Protestants, who, during that reign of terror, escaped, at the hazard of their lives, to England, and the descriptions given by the envoys, commissaries, and captains of Lewis. All agreed in declaring that it would take many years to repair the waste which had been wrought in a few weeks by the armed peasantry. Some of the Saxon aristocracy had mansions richly furnished, and sideboards gorgeous with silver bowls and chargers. All this wealth disappeared. One house, in which there had been three thousand pounds' worth of plate, was left without a spoon. But the chief riches of Ireland consisted in cattle. Innumerable flocks and herds covered that vast expanse of emerald meadow, saturated with the moisture of the Atlantic. More than one gentleman possessed twenty thousand sheep and four thousand oxen. freebooters who now overspread the country belonged to a class which was accustomed to live on potatoes and sour whey, and which had always regarded meat as a luxury reserved for the rich. These men at first revelled in beef and mutton, as the savage invaders, who of old poured down from the forests of the north on Italy, revelled in Massic and Falernian wines. The Protestants described with contemptuous disgust the strange gluttony of their newly-liberated slaves. The

The

carcases, half raw and half burned to cinders, sometimes still bleeding, sometimes in a state of loathsome decay, were torn to pieces and swallowed without salt, bread, or herbs. Those marauders who preferred boiled meat, being often in want of kettles, contrived to boil the steer in his own skin. An absurd tragicomedy is still extant, which was acted in this and the following year at some low theatre for the amusement of the English populace. A crowd of half-naked savages appeared on the stage, howling a Celtic song and dancing round an ox. They then proceeded to cut steaks out of the animal while still alive, and to fling the bleeding flesh on the coals. In truth, the barbarity and filthiness of the banquets of the Rapparees was

such as the dramatists of Grub Street could scarcely caricature. When Lent began, the plunderers generally ceased to devour, but continued to destroy. A peasant would kill a cow merely in order to get a pair of brogues. Often a whole flock of sheep, often a herd of fifty or sixty kine, was slaughtered: the beasts were flayed; the fleeces and hides were carried away; and the bodies were left to poison the air. The French ambassador reported to his master that, in six weeks, fifty thousand horned cattle had been slain in this manner, and were rotting on the ground all over the country. The number of sheep that were butchered during the same time was popularly said to have been three or four hundred thousand.

Before the memorable stand was made at Derry and Enniskillen,—

The people of Kenmare held out in their little fastness till they were attacked by three thousand regular soldiers, and till it was known that several pieces of ordnance were coming to batter down the turf wall which surrounded the agent's house. Then at length a capitulation was concluded. The colonists were suffered to embark in a small vessel scantily supplied with food and water. They had no experienced navigator on board; but after a voyage of a fortnight, during which they were crowded together like slaves in a Guinea ship, and suffered the extremity of thirst and hunger, they reached Bristol in safety. When such was the fate of the towns, it was evident that the country seats which the Protestant landowners had recently fortified in the three southern provinces could no longer be defended. Many families submitted, delivered up their arms, and thought themselves happy in escaping with life. But many resolute and high-spirited gentlemen and yeomen were determined to perish rather than yield. They packed up such valuable property as could easily be carried away, burned whatever they could not remove, and, well armed and mounted, set out for those spots in Ulster which were the strongholds of their race and of their

faith. The flower of the Protestant population of Munster and Connaught found shelter at Enniskillen. Whatever was bravest and most true-hearted in Leinster took the road to Londonderry.

How the siege of Derry was pressed and raised, Mr. Macaulay has described with that pictorial ardour by which he captivates the judgment of his readers. It was long before the army of Schomberg, disorganized by disease and recklessness, could take the field; and the main effort towards the subjugation of Ireland was conducted by William himself. Mr. Macaulay carries his hero across the Boyne with an impetuosity equal to his own:

All was smoke, dust, and din. Old soldiers were heard to say that they had seldom seen sharper work in the Low Countries. But, just at this conjuncture, William came up with the left wing. He had found much difficulty in crossing. The tide was running fast. His charger had been forced to swim, and had been almost lost in the mud. As soon as the king was on firm ground he took his sword in his left hand-for his right arm was stiff with his wound and his bandage— and led his men to the place where the fight was the hottest. His arrival decided the fate of the day. Yet the Irish horse retired fighting obstinately. It was long remembered among the Protestants of Ulster that, in the midst of the tumult, William rode to the head of the Enniskilleners. "What will you do for me?" he cried. He was not immediately recognised : and one trooper, taking him for an enemy, was about to fire. William gently put aside the carbine. "What!" said he, "do you not know your friends?" "It is His Majesty," said the Colonel. The ranks of sturdy Protestant yeomen set up a shout of joy. "Gentlemen," said William, "you shall be my guards to-day. I have heard much of you. Let me see something of you." One of the most remarkable peculiarities of this man, ordinarily so saturnine and reserved, was that danger acted on him like wine, opened his heart, loosened his tongue, and took away all appearance of constraint from his manner. On this memorable day he was seen wherever the peril was greatest. One ball struck the cap of his pistol; another carried off the heel of his jackboot; but his lieutenants in vain implored him to retire to some station from which he could give his orders without exposing a life so valuable to Europe. His troops, animated by his example, gained ground fast.

We cannot dwell on the exciting narrative, as we have no more space at our disposal at present.

WEIMAR, a somewhat torpid, sausage-eating town, is, to collective phlegmatic Germany, what Stratford-upon-Avon is to alert, practical England. To a German, or Germanized fancy, the bright little Ilm may stand proxy for pastoral Avon; Eisenach may do duty as a vapid Leamington; the castle of Wartburg as historic Warwick; Jena foreshadow possible Oxford; and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Jupiter Optimus

Maximus Germanorum, express and inspire as pleasant a national sensation as our gentle Will Shakspeare of blessed and immortal memory. Somehow or other, the character of the great German poet is as difficult for an English fancy to fondle as his name is to harmonize.

A cold, glacial theory of a man, very grand and Alp-like, supremely impervious to common working-day-world action; an altitude of exist

ence unimaginable to the weak, peccable understanding; the pure intellect, self-poised selfcentred self-sufficing, intense prudence justice and knowledge, detached from, and unadulterated with, an alloy of human sociality or sympathy, this is the heroic image which, with pipe and bag-pipe, sackbut and sax-horn, and all sorts of vehement and unrelenting music, we have been called upon to fall down and worship. Still, though in spite of all the outcry, Goethe-worship has neither in Germany nor in this country been a very popular nor prosperous devoteeism, the insanity and noisiness of the hierophants have borne no proportion to the sanity and calmness of the public. From chattering Eckermann down to simply wearisome Viehoff, from domestic Mrs. Austin down to errant Lewes, pamphlets, sketches, diaries, correspondences, lives and counter-lives have accumulated into what Mr. Carlyle would call "a jungle," hopeless for any but one under the influence of Goethe-lepsy to penetrate. Mr. Carlyle who contents himself with here and there a literary ejaculation in favour of Goethe, partly, we think, because the German poet corroborates his pet theory, and partly because he does not forget (and why should he?) Goethe's early laudation has not thought fit to grapple with so unpromising an enterprise. For ten years has Mr. Lewes, with commendable patience and unbaffled pertinacity, ransacked libraries, scrutinized almanacs, besieged booksellers, forsworn domestic delights, bored his friends, and, no doubt, gratified his enemies by doings which, if they do not serve to popularize, at any rate tend to illustrate his high admiration of Goethe. The result is here before us in two very handsomely-printed volumes, containing, amid a mass of digressive and very irrelevant philosophizing (philosophy we cannot call that set forth by Comte or his disciples), much that is new, picturesquely put, and in no small degree interesting. A German book it is essentially, in phrase, cast, and evolution; and in that language, and from that standpunkt, would be less confusing, if not quite comprehensible, as in not a few parts it appears in its present shape.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born at noon of the 28th of August, 1749, in the old feudal town of Frankfort-on-the-Main. His grandfather was an itinerant tailor; his grandmother, the well-dowered widow of an hotel-keeper; his father, a cold, dry, stiff model of a German imperial councillor; and his mother the beau idéal of what a poet's mother should be,-young, quick, fresh and joyous-her letters "not always grammatical nor irreproachable in orthography," but very lively and vigorous.

"I do always what is disagreeable first," says "and gulp down the devil without looking

she,

at him." On this principle she seems to have married. Wolfgang was the first and only surviving son, born when his mother was only eighteen. "We held fast together," she used to say, "because we were both young together." A very handsome boy, with a considerable bump of æsthetic destructiveness, fond of smashing crockery on account of the musical sound and the approbation of the neighbouring juveniles similarly artistic, fond of stories, to him often calamitous verities. "Mother, the princess won't marry the nasty tailor, even if he does kill the giant," was a not unfrequent interpolation and protest on the part of the fervid little artist. At three years old he would play with little children only on condition of their being pretty. "That black child must go away,' cried this gay southern, in a neighbour's house; "I can't bear him!" At four, he took to puppetshows and making of worlds. At six, he was a pert young sceptic, and independent enough to question the popular theology on account of the earthquake at Lisbon. "It may, after all, be a much simpler matter than the clergyman thinks," he urged, after a sermon. "God knows very well that an immortal soul can receive no injury from a mortal accident." At seven, he denied the justice of public opinion on Frederick the Great, and became, perhaps from his decided dramatic and scientific turn, a nature-worshipper. At any rate, in his bed-room he built an altar-like pyramid of ores, set a pastille on the top, and lit it through a burning-glass from the morning sun. His Latin exercises are perplexingly precocious, and as noteworthy as his temper, more easily prone to anger than tears. His appetite for knowledge was omnivorous— he wrote a romance in half-a-dozen languages, and dabbled in chemicals and alchemy. At fifteen, he began life as a love-adventurer after the most approved Rousseau fashion, and was very properly sent off from the parental indulgence, in a home-made suit, and with a broad Frankfort accent, to the university of Leipsic, where, among "the fast "students, he cut a somewhat sorry figure. Jurisprudence was the path the father selected, a great deal too

"I

rough and rugged for the son's taste. fancied I knew about as much of God and the world as the professor himself; and logic, in many places, seemed to come to a dead standstill." He renounced attendance at lectures for the delight of apple-fritters, which used to come smoking from the pan exactly at the lecture-hour.

Here is a glimpse of him at this time :

"To-day I have heard two lectures: Böhme on law, and Ernesti on Cicero's Orator. That 'll do, eh? Next week we have collegium philosophicum et mathematicum. I haven't seen Gottsched yet. He is married again. She is nineteen and he sixty-five. She is four

feet high, and he seven feet. She is as thin as a herring, and he as broad as a feathersack. I make a great figure here! But as yet I am no dandy. I never shall become one. I need some skill to be industrious. In society, concerts, theatre, feastings, promenades, the time flies. Ha! it goes gloriously. But also expensively. The devil knows how my purse feels it. Hold! rescue! stop! see'st thou that they leave off flying? There go two louis d'or. Help! there goes another. Heavens! another couple are gone. Pence are here as farthings are with you. Nevertheless one can live cheaply here. So I hope to get off with two hundred thalers-what do I say? with three hundred. N.B. Not including what has already gone to the devil.

Some forty pages of love-making, melodramatizing, dabbling in drawing and engraving an inordinate application to German beer and coffee; a serious fit of hypochondria and doubt; a tumour in the neck; a philosophic mode of disposing of a love disappointment by entreating the lady not to answer him any more; these, not omitting Mr. Lewes's very profound Teutonic disquisition on nominalism and realism, bring us to the dawn of that poetic period when he entered Strasburg with the bloom and grace of an Apollo. In each restaurant he visited, plump and prosy burghers, intent on pâte and dumpling, laid down their knives and forks in a stupor of artistic delight. A youth, not over tall, but slim and "musically made," with eager, lustrous brown eyes, massive head, full, voluptuous mouth, short arched lip, ample cheek and neck, he seemed more naturally destined to song than jurisprudence; yet to that study he took more kindly now. ""Tis with all things," he moralized, "as with Merseburg beer; the first time we shudder at it, and having drunk it for a week, we cannot do without it." His scrap-book indicates a strange medley of tastes; here a scrap from Thomas à Kempis, then a smart, keen sarcasm from Bayle or Rousseau; then an analysis of Plato's "Phædo," side by side with an original piece of Pantheism in Teutonic Latin; in fact, a fair type of very his life. The sacrament one day, and trying to be religious, with dull, pious, narrow-minded people; and next day sitting propped up from early morning, with his hair powdered, fencing and dancing, and wild rollickings, all day and night. No lack is there, though, of more admirable traits of wonderful advance in self-mastery and bodily control. How that, to cure himself of a horror of loud sounds, he stood close to the drums when they beat the tattoo at night, and went up to the highest pinnacle of Strasburg Cathedral by way of remedying the weakness of dizziness. Against the imaginative terrors of darkness, he armed himself by frequenting churchyards and dreary solitudes by night.

Still, what would life be without flirtation? is the continual refrain of our German Alcibiades;

How delicious a sensation is the hope of seeing again those we love. And we, when our coddled heart is a little sorrowful, at once bring it medicine, and say, from her you love; be quiet, dear little heart!" "Dear little heart, be quiet; you will not long be away Meanwhile, we give it a chimera to play with, and then is it good and still as a child to whom the mother gives a doll instead of the apple which it must not eat.

Never did Strasburg seem so empty to me as now. I hope, indeed, it will be better when the remembrance of those charming hours is a little dimmed; when I no longer feel so vividly how good, how amiable my friend is. Yet ought I to forget that, or to wish it? No; I will rather retain a little sorrow, and write long or frequently.

To your dear sister many hundred would so willingly give you again.

. ....

what I

In fact, his life at this time is exactly what he himself describes it-"A sledge-journey,

splendid and sounding; but with just as little for the heart as it has much for eyes and ears." Actions for breach of promise do not daunt the philosophic experimenter in female psychology in Germany; hence our savant writes, happy is he whose heart is light and free. They say that love gives courage. Never! The heart that loves is weak."

66

'How

From fifteen to threescore and ten Goethe

peeped and botanized into the human heart. He had no vulgar, philanthropic movings; no national fervours; no cosmopolitan outbursts. Life was to him simply an enigma; an unknown quantity which he must solve as he best could; and pleasant and curious enough to him was the labour. What he could not concrete into a use or a poem he cared little for; when he had classified the rose, and determined the genus of the violet, he recked little whether he had frayed or torn the petals, or dissipated the

scent in the examination. Man was but to him

the clasp of the chain of life; his love, his anger, his jealousy, even his misery he peered and pryed into with as little remorse as he scrutinized a fossil or a crystal. Why should he feel for a woman's heart more than he would

care for the core of a flower.

"Take it up tenderly,
Lift it with care,
Fashioned so slenderly,
Fashioned so fair,"

Was the precept of a school far too ideal and transcendental for him. We pass over his rap