average size of the French conscripts is Figurative illustrations are as fatal to Mr. stated, a few pages before, at only five feet Alison as they are, indeed, to most writers English. (ix. 105.) In 1800, the French who are at once careless and ambitious. armies appear to have unjustly seized some His opinion of the age of George III. is exEnglish vessels at Leghorn, an acquisition pressed by an astronomical metaphor, which which,' in the singular phraseology of Mr. he has contrived to distort with a perverse Alison, speedily recoiled upon the heads of ingenuity rarely surpassed. Bright,' he those who acquired them.'-(iv. 381.) In says, 'as were the stars of its morning light, the campaign of Austerlitz we find the Aus- more brilliant still was the constellation trians defeated by Murat, who made 1800 which shone forth in its meridian splendor, of their wearied columns prisoners, (v. 406) or cast a glow over the twilight of its even-a capture which, supposing the statement ing shades.'-(vii. 3.) The simile would to be literally true, and the columns of have been perfect of its kind, if Mr. Alison average size, must have embraced nearly had but added that his constellation had disthe whole male population of the empire. appeared, as constellations are wont to do, And shortly after, we are informed, that the in the darkness of the ensuing night. In French army celebrated the anniversary of the same manner, he speaks of a narrative Napoleon's coronation by the spontaneous as 'tinged with undue bias,' (Pref. xxxi.)— combustion' of their huts.-(v. 474.) We of a historical work as closed with a ray will not go farther with examples of this of glory,' (Pref. xxxviii.)-of a truth as 'prosort, but we cannot forbear soliciting Mr. claimed in characters of fire to mankind.' Alison's attention to two crying defects; (viii. 7.) We cannot omit the two followhis profuse and unscrupulous use of the ing sentences, which we consider to be almost barbarous Scotticisms, and the con- most unique. The first contains a simile fused and even ambiguous arrangement of which to us is utterly unintelligible-the his antecedents and relatives. With all other an elaborate confusion of metaphor, these imperfections, Mr. Alison's history which nothing but the most patient ingenuhas merits sufficient to atone, even to those ity can unravel. In 1787,' says Mr. Alireaders who consider only their own amuse- son,' 'Goethe, profound and imaginative, ment, for the want of an easy and polished was reflecting on the destiny of man on style. The stirring interest of the events earth, like a cloud which "turns up its silver which he relates, his judgment in selecting lining to the moon."'-(vii. 103.) 'In Linstriking traits of character for preservation, næus she (Sweden) has for ever unfolded his earnest seriousness of manner, and his the hidden key by which the endless variety obvious honesty of purpose-all combine to of floral beauty is to be classified, and the make his narrative on the whole both inter-mysterious link is preserved between vegeesting and impressive. table and animal life.'-(viii. 612*.)

We cannot speak so favorably of the dis- Mr. Alison does not wear his borrowed quisitions on political events and charac- plumes with a better grace than his original ters, which abound throughout his work. ornaments. The following is an instance With all our respect for his merits as a his- of a fine thought carelessly appropriated torian, we are bound to declare our honest and thoroughly spoiled. The British Bard opinion, that the attempts displayed in them in Gray's famous ode speaks of the banners at impassioned and declamatory eloquence, of his victorious enemy as fanned by conare generally very far below mediocrity. quest's crimson wing.' Mr. Alison has We have already noticed some of the blun-adorned a passage of his history with this ders into which he has been betrayed in the easy and spirited metaphor; but he has course of his ordinary narrative. Few most unskilfully transferred the ventilation writers soar more easily or more securely than they walk; and Mr. Alison's oratorical digressions abound in examples of pointless anti-climax, of quaint and ungrammatical inversion, of the carefully balanced antithesis of synonymous ideas, of periods rounded with sonorous pomp, yet constructed with slovenly obscurity. But we are in haste to dismiss this ungracious part of our task, and we shall therefore content ourselves with pointing out a few individual blemishes, the removal of which we are particularly anxious to effect.

from the banners to the minds of the conquerors, and assures us, that it is not while fanned by conquest's crimson wing," that the real motives of human conduct can be made apparent.'-(ix. 104.) A similar and still more painful example of bad taste is to be found in the very next page. All the springs,' says he, which the world can furnish to sustain the fortunes of an empire, were in full activity, and worked with consummate ability; but one (query three ?) was wanting, without which, in the hour of trial, all the others are but as tinkling brass-a

to see.

belief in God, a sense of duty, and a faith We do not think it necessary to apoloin immortality.' The celebrated passage gize for having dwelt so long upon a subfrom which Mr. Alison has here borrowed ject which we have already admitted to be an illustration, is familiar to all our readers. of secondary importance. If we believed It is that in which St. Paul compares the that Mr. Alison had failed in one branch of eloquence of an idle declaimer to the tink- his history from real want of ability, we ling of a cymbal. The original phrase is should have thought it ungenerous to morone of such admirable point and force as to tify the author of a valuable and laborious have become almost proverbial. But how work, by cavilling at the false taste of its has its merit survived Mr. Alison's appro- embellishments. But we cannot imagine priation? He seizes on one half of the that this is the case. It is impossible that simile, severs it from the other, and tacks a man of Mr. Alison's talents and knowit to a new object with which it has no na-ledge should be deliberately blind to the tural connexion whatever. Nothing can be defects and the nonsense we have been more apt and lively than the comparison of quoting. Most of these blemishes are such unmeaning verbosity to the empty ringing as a little reflection would induce a sensible of metal, as every one who studies Mr. schoolboy to strike out of his theme. We Alison's specimens of declamation will al- are apt to think that Mr. Alison has nelow. But how does such a comparison glected these parts of his work; that he express the inefficiency of a mechanical has sketched them when fatigued and exforce? For aught we know, a spring may cited by his labors; and that he has left be of brass, and of tinkling brass too, and the first rough draught unaltered for pubyet be sufficiently strong and elastic. Alication. We are unwilling to deal harshly better illustration, or a worse adaptation, with such errors. There is something both of the apostle's forcible image, than the striking and gratifying in the spectacle of passage just quoted, we do not expect again a writer who is scrupulous of historical truth and justice, but negligent of his own. Tedious self-repetition, the most invete- literary fame-who lavishes that time and rate fault of careless and declamatory wri-trouble in ascertaining his facts, which he ters, has been carried by Mr. Alison to an omits to employ in polishing his style. We almost unprecedented extent. We have are confident that Mr. Alison might, with a neither space nor time to extract some of little care and patience, correct more sehis digressions, in which the selfsame cur-rious faults than those we have noticed; rent of ideas is run through twice or thrice and should this prove to be the case, we in various language. But the mere recur- shall not be sorry if we have made him feel rence of favorite phrases cannot fail to a certain degree of regret for their comstrike and displease the most careless mission. reader. The bow of Esop, the small black cloud of Elijah, the boon of Polypheme to Ulysses, together with numberless less remarkable allusions and expressions, are applied three or four times each, precisely under the same circumstances, and almost in the same words. Winds, waves, meteors, thunderbolts, earthquakes, and similar phenomena of all sorts, are constantly ready to be let loose upon the reader; nor, however frequently he may have sustained them, is he ever, for a single page, secure against their recurrence. As a proof that we have not exaggerated the frequency of this unpleasing practice, we must, in justice to ourselves, refer our readers to the first fifteen pages of Mr. Alison's eighth volume; within which short space they will find no less than thirteen similes and illustrations drawn from light and color, of which nearly one-half are crowded into twentyfive consecutive lines, and no less than four are expressed in the same identical phrase.

As a military historian, Mr. Alison has received general and merited applause. His narratives of warlike operations are well arranged, minute, and spirited; and display considerable scientific knowledge. He is particularly remarkable for the clear and accurate descriptions which he never fails to give of the situations in which the most important manœuvres of the war took place. His sketches are written with as much spirit as topographical knowledge; and he not only impresses on the memory the principal features of the scene of action, but generally succeeds in conveying a vivid picture of them to the imagination. He appears, indeed, to have been induced, by his strong interest in the subject, to visit most of Napoleon's fields of battle in person; and it is but just to say, that he has surveyed them with the feeling of an artist and the precision of a tactician.

The lively coloring of Mr. Alison's descriptions of battles is, in general, as pleasing as the accuracy of the outline is praise

worthy. He has a strong and manly sym- tion. It is impossible not to feel animated pathy with military daring and devotion, by the fiery energy, and the graphic miwhich never blinds him to the sufferings nuteness of his descriptions. But his most inflicted by war, but which leads him to give partial admirers will allow, that the more warm and impartial praise to every brave fanciful and brilliant peculiarities of his action, by whichever party achieved. We style, are such as must make all attempts might easily fill our pages with interesting at imitation difficult and dangerous to an extracts of this nature; but we must con- unusual degree. Its fervent impetuosity tent ourselves with referring our readers to occasionally overpowers even its master, the work itself. There is scarcely an im- and it is unlikely to prove more docile in portant victory of the war which Mr. Alison less familiar hands. Colonel Napier's gehas not related in the fullest detail, and nius, if we may be pardoned the comparison, with the strictest impartiality. We may resembles those Indian figurantes described also remark the successful art with which by Captain Mundy in his amusing sketches, he occasionally pauses, in the most critical whose chief difficulty is to restrain within moment of a great battle, to remind his graceful limits the superabundant supplereaders, by a word dexterously thrown in, ness and agility of their limbs. It is the of the mighty interests at stake. It is an luxuriant vivacity of the writer's imaginaartifice to which he has perhaps too freely tion, and his unlimited command of pointed resorted, but which he occasionally em- and original language, that occasion the ploys with marked effect. principal blemishes in his style. And it is impossible to deny, that when he gives the rein to his fancy, it occasionally hurries him across the fatal step which separates the sublime, we will not say from the ridiculous, but assuredly from the quaint and grotesque.

Still, Mr. Alison's finest descriptions are occasionally marred by the same faults which we have remarked in his political dissertations; by the same tendency to flights of poetical extravagance; the same wearisome repetitions; the same flow of sonorous verbosity. We forbear to recom mence our reluctant strictures upon these faults of style; but there is a single error which we are unwilling to pass over, be cause we believe it to be peculiar to this branch of the narrative. We allude to the occasional substitution of the present for the past tense in the relation of events. It is one of the most unimpressive and unpleasing artifices which a writer can employ rarely admissible in narrative poetry, scarcely ever in prose romance, and utterly inconsistent with the sober dignity of the historical style. Much of all this is, no doubt, to be attributed to the incorrectness of taste indisputably displayed by Mr. Alison in many of the more impassioned passages of his work; but much, we suspect, is owing to an injudicious and indiscriminate, though just and laudable, admiration for the genius of a rival historian.

Mr. Alison frequently speaks with warm and generous applause of the ardent military eloquence which distinguishes the style of Colonel Napier. Nothing can be more handsomely expressed than this feeling; but we suspect that it has occasionally betrayed Mr. Alison into unconscious, and not always happy, imitation. We appreciate as highly as any one the force and originality of the language employed by this great military historian. Among all his high qualities none is more conspicuous than the warmth and vigor of his narra

We are far from accusing Mr. Alison of caricaturing Colonel Napier's manner. We think his descriptions a softened, and in some respects an improved copy of those of his great original. But Colonel Napier's battle-pieces are in a style which will not bear softening-we had almost said, in a style which will not bear improvement. We know no description so appropriate to it as the quaint expression applied by Henry Grattan to Lord Chatham's oratory-that it was very great, and very odd.' Its eccentricity cannot be corrected without weakening its energy; it is either strikingly yet irregularly lofty, or it becomes tame, hollow, and exaggerated. With Colonel Napier himself the last is never the case. His faults are as racy and as characteristic as his beauties; and in his boldest offences against taste, his originality and vigor are conspicuous.

Still, this lively melodramatic style, even when most successful, is not that which we prefer for historical narrative. We are no very rigid advocates for what is called the dignity of history. We have no doubt that thousands of interesting facts have perished, never to be recovered, by the supercil ious neglect of over formal historians. We would have all circumstances preserved which can add the least effect to the narrative, however trivial they may appear. But we do not see the advantage of ornamental descriptions, however striking in

is in comparison with the beautiful statue of the Attacking Gladiator. Both figures are admirable works of art, and both are represented in the act of vehement and victorious exertion. But how striking is the contrast between the desperate energy of the mortal, and the serene indifference of the divinity!

themselves, which comprise merely general and common-place particulars, such as could not but accompany the main facts related. There is, surely, something unpleasing in seeing a historian, while recounting events which shook and terrified all Europe, glance aside to notice the trembling of the earth under a heavy cannonade, or the glittering of helmets in a charge of During the twenty-five years included in cavalry. We object to such flights, not Mr. Alison's History, Europe was so perpetbecause they are beneath the dignity of the ually involved in war, that in giving our narrative, but because they diminish the opinion of his merits as a military historisimplicity to which it must owe much of an, we may be said to have pronounced its awful effect; and because they can be upon those of the whole narrative part of far more imposingly supplied by the imagi- his work. But he has taken great pains to nation of the reader. It is not by such give his readers the most complete inforrhetorical arts as these, that the great mas- mation of all the internal transactions of ters of history have produced their most the chief European nations, during that pesuccessful effects. Thucydides has never riod. He has, as he informs us, made it once throughout his work departed from his rule 'to give the arguments for and the grave and simple dignity of his habitual against any public measures in the words style. Yet what classical scholar will of those who originally brought them forever forget the condensed pathos and energy ward, without any attempt at paraphrase with which he has described the desolation or abridgement. This is more particularof Athens during the pestilence, or the ly the case in the debates of the National overthrow of the Syracusan expedition? Assembly of France, the Parliament of Froissart is a still more extraordinary in- England, and the Council of State under stance. Without for a moment suffering Napoleon. bimself to be raised above his ordinary tone of easy and almost childish garrulity, he has yet attained that chivalrous ardor of expression, which, to borrow the emphatic words of Sidney, stirs the heart like the sound of a trumpet.' What soldier ever read without enthusiasm his account of the battle of Crecy Not, we are confident, Colonel Napier, whose warm and ready sympathy with the brave is one of his noblest qualities as a historian. The brilliant array of the French chivalry-the fierce gestures and 'fell cry' of the undisciplined Genoese-the motionless silence of the English archery-the sudden and deadly flight of arrows-the mad confusion of the routed army;-all are painted with the life and vigor of Homer himself. And yet the chronicler has not employed a shade of fanciful coloring or poetical ornament-his whole narrative is full of the same simple and delightful naïveté with which he commends the innocence of the Black Prince's oaths; or celebrates the 'small hat of beaver' which became Edward III. so marvellously at the battle of Sluys. In reading such passages as these, we feel the same admiration as in seeing an athlete perform some feat of surpassing strength, without the distortion of a feature or a muscle. They are, in comparison with the florid and highly wrought style on which we have been remarking, what the Belvidere Apollo

It is,' as he justly remarks, 'the only mode by which the spirit and feelings of the moment could be faithfully transmitted to posterity, or justice done to the motives, on either side, which influenced mankind.'-(Pref. xliv.) 'Providence,' says Mr. Alison, has so interwoven human affairs, that when we wish to retrace the revolutions of a people, and to investigate the causes of their grandeur or misfortune, we are insensibly conducted step by step to their cradle.'-(ii. 536.) The historian has accordingly interwoven. with his narrative several very interesting and comprehensive sketches of the previ ous history and political state of those nations who took the most prominent share in events. We may particularize those of France, England, Russia, Turkey, and Poland, as the most complete and elaborate. They include a general description of the population, of the nature and capabilities of the countries in question, and contain much valuable statistical information. We think Mr. Alison mistaken in some of the maxims and theories which he draws from these views of European history; but it is impossible to refuse him the merit of much accurate knowledge, and much patient and ingenious reflection.

Mr. Alison's principal and fatal error is one which we can only lament; for we can neither blame him for its existence, nor wonder at its effects-he is a rigid, a sin

noyance.

In common with nearly all political writers of the present day, we have had repeated occasion to pronounce our opinion both upon revolutions in general, and in particular upon that which forms the main subject of Mr. Alison's history. We shall not, of course, repeat our arguments in detail; as we see no occasion to correct the conclusions which we drew from them. We shall merely allude to them so far as may be necessary for the purpose of comparing them with the opinions of Mr. Alison respecting the causes, the character, and the consequences of the French Revolution.

cere, and an intolerant Tory. This is the [born Englishman, sufficient to cause a civil whole extent of his offence. His opinions war. He then proceeds to notice several are displayed with sufficient fairness, if circumstances which were likely to render not always with perfect taste and modes- the French nation, at that moment, pecuty; he does not permit them to pervert liarly impatient of the hardships they had to his statements of facts, though he seldom endure. So far, nothing can be more satloses an opportunity of asserting them in isfactory. He has clearly shown that a all their uncharitable austerity. To this sudden and violent change was inevitable; practice every liberal-minded reader, of and that, without the utmost skill and firmhowever opposite principles, will easily ness in the government, that change was reconcile himself. He will, it is true, have likely to be followed by fatal excesses. to travel through an interesting tract of But he goes on to declare, in all the emhistory, in company with an honorable op- phasis of capital type, that the circumstanponent, instead of a sympathizing friend. ces which have now been mentioned, withHe will necessarily lose much pleasure, out doubt contributed to the formation of and some instruction; but a few precau- that discontent which formed the predistions will ensure him against injury or an- posing cause of the Revolution. But the exciting cause, as physicians would saythe immediate source of the convulsionwas the SPIRIT OF INNOVATION, which, like a malady, overspread France at that crisis, precipitated all classes into a passion for changes, of which they were far from perceiving the ultimate effect, and in the end produced evils far greater than those they were intended to remove. It would seem,' he adds, 'as if, at particular periods, from causes inscrutable to human wisdom, an universal frenzy seizes mankind; reason, experience, prudence, are alike blinded, and the very persons who are to perish in the storm are the first to We must, however, preface our observa- raise its fury.'-(i. 149.) This is a good tions by declaring, that we have found con-specimen of the superficial verbiage which siderable difficulty in extracting any consis formed the chorus of the English Tory tent and definite opinion, from the present press fifty years ago. We confess that we work, upon the general tendency of that always considered it strange language to event. We have been wholly unable to come from shrewd, sensible men of the reconcile the author's calm and just re-world-from men who, when reasoning on marks upon the nature of the French gov- the crimes and follies of social life, would ernment under the ancient régime, with his have been the first to laugh such vague jarvague and incoherent bursts of invective gon to scorn. Still these men had at least against the spirit by which it was subver- an excuse which Mr. Alison has not. The ted. He speaks of violent revolutions, explanation, bad as it was, was the best sometimes as the stern but beneficial pun- they had to give. They did not possess the ishments of tyranny and corruption-some- information which we now have, respecttimes as national fits of insanity, the judging the system which had brutalized and ment of Providence upon moral profligacy enraged the French people; and if they and religious skepticism. His logic con- had, they might be excused, at such a crivinces us that what he is pleased to call thesis, for failing to reason justly upon it. revolutionary mania is in itself a very nat-But we are at loss to conceive how Mr. Aliural feeling-the instinctive desire of the son can think it necessary to aid the effect oppressed for peace and security. His rhet- of his able and conclusive details, by a oric would persuade us that it is a mysteri- solution so feeble and unmeaning as the ous epidemic, displaying itself merely by a above. We forgive the schoolmen of the morbid thirst for innovation, and an insane middle ages for saying that the water rises delight in crime. In his second chapter, in the pump because nature abhors a vacuhe details nearly a dozen intolerable griev-um; for the answer was merely a pompous ances which existed in France down to the confession of ignorance. But what should first outbreak of popular violence; almost we think of a modern philosopher who any one of which would appear, to a free-should solve the same problem by telling