WE have at length arrived at the tenth and closing volume of Mr Alison's able and important work; and, while we congratulate the writer on the intelligence which conceived, the talent which sustained, and the vigour which completed such a performance, we still more congratulate the country on the possession of one of the noblest offerings which our age has laid upon the altar of historic lite

rature.

The choice of the subject itself was highly judicious. It gave great opportunities to a writer capable of employing them. The French Revolution was the most influential event since the Reformation. In its magnitude, its depth of appeal to human opinions, the extent to which it impressed the old European system, and the strong impulse which it has given to the minds of nations, there is a singular resemblance to the prime mover of the sixteenth century. Their principles alone differ, and the difference, in that point, is obviously extreme; but their instrumentality has a remarkable similitude. The same element which sweeps away the harvest and the soil, is the source of all fertility. The furrow torn up by the thunderbolt differs little in appearance from the tillage of the plough. The especial characteristic of both was, that they addressed themselves

to a new source of power; that, abandoning the old and formal influences of the state, they adopted influences altogether new; that, abandoning the old official organs of national impression, they spoke directly to the multitude. Leaving thrones and hierarchies to their stately inefficiency, they turned their faces at once to the vast aggregate who stood without the walls of palace and temple, and who answered them with a shout, which in the former instance shook superstition in its strongholds, and in the latter loosened the foundations of all established rule. But here the similitude ends. The Reformation was the greatest gift of Providence since the establishment of Christianity; the French Revolution the most reckless display of human guilt since the supremacy of Rome. The one was an illustrious example of those interpositions by which the Supreme Disposer condescends from time to time to invigorate man, willing, but too weak, for virtue. latter was an example of that remorseless and precipitate rapidity with which man, left to the guidance of the passions, plunges into public and personal ruin.

The

But the advantages of the Revolution as a subject of authorship, are more striking than those of the Reformation. It was a complete event,

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circumscribed within a quarter of a century; an entire action, of the highest interest and most extraordinary variousness of incident and character, compressed into the briefest period of any one great change in history; an action, too, near enough to our time to possess the full excitement of novelty, yet remote enough to supply us with the calmness and strength of ascertained fact. The Revolution has utterly passed away in substance, but still exists in spirit; for no man can rationally look upon the feverish condition of Europe at the present day, the restlessness of the public mind, or the power of popular opinion every where, without tracing their alliance with the convulsions of 1789. Nothing can be clearer, than that the old constitution of European government has been essentially altered, however it may retain its shape, in foreign countries. Like the conjecture of some of our philosophers, that, in the deluge, the axis of the earth sustained a shock which changed its climates; the moral deluge which, in our day, overran the civilized world, did more than sweep its surface-it shifted the position of its governmental poles, and impressed a new character upon the temperament of its nations. Representation, a principle once unheard of but in England, is now the demand or the possession of Europe. What termination it may find is beyond our conjecture; but that it is advancing, and will continue to advance, until it absorbs every other principle, is almost a matter of demonstration. Yet the French Revolution has wholly past away. We have seen its cradle, its maturity, and its grave. Like the double entombment of Napoleon, it was inhumed alike at Marengo and at Waterloo. Or, like that mighty soldier himself, its spirit may be wandering through earth or air, but its body will never reappear before men, at least in the shape in which it descended into the sepulchre. Europe exhibits an almost total suppression of the republican forms; and the first fruits of the Revolution have been a harvest of minor monarchies. France herself is controlled by a powerful throne, using popular forms only to exercise a more resolute authority over popular passions; skilfully using the Revolution to put down the Revolution, extinguishing

the flame in its own ashes, and sagaciously and constantly employing at once the splendours of monarchy and the vigilance of despotism, to make the people forget the license of the Republic, or dread a collision with the weight of the sovereignty. At once to dazzle and restrain; to make the populace proud, yet afraid of the sceptre; to indulge the national love of display, and yet keep the national caprices in rigid subordination, is the existing policy. Far be it from us to visit it with blame; it is the only policy for France. Yet this is only the régime of Louis XIV., exercised with a more delicate skill, and adapted to a more trying era. The building of Versailles was more a stratagem of state than even an indulgence of royal luxury. The new embellishment of Versailles is in the same spirit; but the king has added to it the fortification of Paris, and the union is only emblematic of the time.

Mr Alison will have achieved another triumph if the success of his work shall excite a taste for historical writing among our authors. In the last century England took the lead in history. It was most unfortunate that Gibbon's irreligious follies should have been transferred to his " Decline and Fall of Rome;" for in all other respects he stands at the head of all the historians of his time. His copiousness of knowledge, his rich though formal style, and his singular power of arrangement, rendered his vast history the first in the world. Its massiveness and magnificence remind us of the architecture of antiquity; one of those great Basilicas, at once a palace, a seat of judgment, and a temple, exhibiting boundless ornament, costliness, and solidity of material; yet degraded by many an impure emblem, filled with false worship, and breathing the incense of the passions.

The other two great historians of this period have been too long fixed in their rank to suffer modern censure. Hume was evidently a man of remarkable skill, and nothing can be more adroit than his general ingenuity, or more graceful than the chief portion of his narrative. But more exact knowledge has gradually diminished his interest, and a true and great history of England is yet to be written.

Robertson's name must always be regarded among the honours of his country. He has sincerity, knowledge, and a serious yet forcible eloquence. It is to be regretted that his temperament does not display more of the glow which reanimates dead transactions, and gives immediate interest to men and things long swept away from the eyes of man; perhaps some consideration of his rank as a divine may have modelled his style as a his torian. The most gallant enterprize of patriotism, or the severest sacrifice of piety, is too often recorded with the unimpassioned severity of an inscription on the grave.

Hallam is an exact, laborious, and vigorous writer. But, probably disdaining the graces of style, he naturally loses their captivation. No man more keenly discovers facts, or more rigidly separates truth from fiction, but there he is content. Having quarried the marble, he leaves it to some future hand to bring out the form, and give it those fine touches which constitute beauty. The sternness of his political principles, gives sternness to all his conceptions. His saturnine and formal school is never surprised into sympathy with human actions. He classes the noblest historic recollections like the plants of a hortus siccus, or the minerals of a museum, and lectures on them with the coldness of a philosopher in the midst of his shelves. The king, the soldier, and the beauty, are to him merely specimens. In his most glowing moments, he only sits like one of the judges of the dead in the ancient mythology, calmly passes sentence on the departed clay, and coldly dismisses the mighty movers of the earth to the land of shadows.

The later writers of history in England have scarcely risen beyond the rank of compilers. "Memoirs to serve for the use of historians," "Notes," "Dissertations," are in general the highest title which their labours deserve. Their volumes have been chiefly written by Whigs, and of course, for party purposes-this renders them useless for purposes of all higher kinds. Whiggism, in its best points of view, is prejudice that refuses to be enlightened, ignorance that defies instruction, and self-sufficiency that perverts experience. In its worse points, it is hypocrisy boast

ing of its candour, venality pretending to independence, and perfidy trafficking in principle. A Whig can no more comprehend the constitution than a gambler can honour the tenth commandment.

The modern French historians have the universal vice of their country. All their tastes are theatrical; their language, their conceptions, their judgments are all borrowed from the stage. With the most painful effort for novelty, they have not the power of producing any thing new beyond the smartness of a vaudeville. Where great events come before them, they are marched across their pages as if they were heralded by the trumpets and drums of the "Grande opera;" characters are dressed in tinsel; show and sentiment are borrowed from Corneille and Racine. The History of the Revolution from the pen of M. Thiers, might be cut up into scenes, and represented on the Française at twentyfour hours' notice.

Germany has yet, produced but one man gifted with the true powers of a historian, and that man also her only great dramatist. Schiller's "Thirty Years' War" is a noble performance, at once profound and glowing, subtle and substantial; but it is too narrow for the foundation of a historic fame. It has another obstacle. No man can be a great writer without the spirit of a poet. But Schiller has made his history too poetical; it is a gallery of illustrious shades, which he less describes than invocates. It is an epic in prose. The tastes of Germany, though ultra-commonplace in the general things of life, yet swell into unaccountable extravagance wherever the subject belongs to higher scenes. There is an evident consciousness of its earthward tendency in the German mind, which makes it fearful of trusting to the course of nature; it doubts its own limbs, and therefore borrows stilts; it knows the national propensity to creep on the ground, and therefore it strains every effort to spring into the air; the most matter-of-fact of all existing generations, it yearns to be the most ethereal; a German genius is nothing without a rapture, and his rapture is reverie; his muse is metaphysical, and his metaphysics press as nearly as possible to the verge where "madness rules the realm beyond." There is