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ART. III-History of the Commonwealth of England.

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From its Com

mencement to the Restoration of Charles the Second. By William Godwin, vols. i. ii. iii. Svo. London. Colburn. 1824, 1826, 1827.

"IF the design were not too multifarious and extensive," says

Dr. Johnson, in his 45th Idler, "I should wish that our painters would attempt the Dissolution of the Parliament by Cromwell. The point of time may be chosen when Cromwell, looking round the Pandemonium with contempt, ordered the

bauble to be taken away; and Harrison laid hands on the Speaker to drag him from the chair.”

It was neither a picture, nor a series of pictures, but a History which was wanting to the epochs of the Commonwealth. It is perfectly astonishing how small and inadequate a share of that attention which is now at length devoted by intelligent readers to the causes and commencement of the civil wars, has hitherto been fairly carried on to the crisis we intend to review. Until the publication of Mr. Godwin's third volume, no accurate and equitable history had appeared of a period by far the most important in our annals.* It has been truly said by that author, that "the men who figured during the Interregnum were, immediately after the Restoration, spoken of with horror, and their memoirs were composed after the manner of the Newgate Calendar. What was begun from party rage, has been continued from indolence. No research has been exercised; no public measures have been traced to their right authors; even the succession of judges, public officers, and statesmen, has been left in impenetrable confusion !"

From such treatment of the facts of history we might infer that scant justice had been done to its philosophy, which has, indeed, found little enough place in most English histories of revolutions. Such narratives have commonly been composed by the mere pens of all work in the pay of aristocracy; or at best by uninvestigating, elegant triflers, who, if they write without party-spirit, write also without principle. What sort of history the former class of writers will be able or willing to produce is conceivable without much effort. Events, their causes and their consequences, will be thrown into designed confusion; the characters of the best and of the worst, of the earliest and the latest, revolutionists will be identified in order to be doomed together; the paroxysm and the madness of a moment will be treated as the temper of whole years and generations; no principle appearing in the mighty maze, unless the mean ambition to disgust and terrify, by the grouping of unnatural figures, and the artifices of unnatural colouring. The latter school of writers show a little more taste in their abuse of the historical easel. Their language for the most part is decent, and they do not absolutely lose sight of the great mass of men

*We mean no disparagement to the labours of Mr. Brodie, whose History formed the subject of an article in one of our early Numbers. But his principal design was to expose and rectify the mis-statements of Hume, and other historians of the character and reign of Charles I. To the period, strictly speaking, of the Commonwealth, he has not devoted two hundred pages.

in their intentness on a few prominent characters. They seldom pursue any single individual with an excessive heat of praise or of blame. They seldom pass over any party in the state as utterly beneath their notice. They see as much of all things as a single glance can show them; and at every single glance they generalise. Like the careless Polytheist, whose Pantheon would accommodate new deities to any extent, of whose existence he neither knew nor cared for the evidence; for every new aspect of affairs, these writers have a new form of words, which they utter with as much easy confidence, as if it involved a most profound explanation of the phenomena for which it was invented. "The unaccountable, yet striking, varieties of enthusiasm and superstition;" "the ungovernable passions of the multitude;"" their religious and political fanaticism," afford in their opinion a complete solution of the problems which present themselves in every popular struggle.

In truth, the passions of the multitude are not so properly religious or political, as plebeian. We shall hardly be suspected of employing this epithet in any invidious or insulting sense. Excluded from the sympathies of those above them, and debarred from every regular and sober public function, the multitude is reduced of necessity to organise its own combinations to make itself respected by numerical force, and feared by ostentatious ferocity. Oppress-keep ignorant-the mass of mankind you will not destroy its physical strength, but you will turn that strength towards error and excess; you will have a fanatic conventicle, or a Jacobin club. You will have no people, it is true; but you will full surely have a populace a populace arrayed against the progress of civilization, from which it has received no benefit-denouncing all the horrors of this world or the next, the penalties of malignancy, or incivism, against the wise, whose reasonings they do not understand; and the rich, in whose advantages they do not participate.

Will the middle classes ever learn respect for themselves→→ will they ever learn to vindicate their rank in the Commonwealth? Repelled on the one hand by aristocratic haughtiness, on the other by plebeian distrust, will they ever quell the former by a frank disdain-the latter by a clear sincerity? While the predominance of rank yet endures, are they contented to be classed among its humblest adorers-when that falls, are they resolved to have deserved no share in the confidence and affection of the people? This has been the rock on which have hitherto split the fairest hopes of political improvement in Europe. Contemning the many, and contemned by the few, in the infirm old age of aristocracy, the middle class

has tamely suffered all its moroseness; in the inevitable hour of democratic ascendancy, the middle class has almost always found itself in a false and ineffective position. It has lost its beneficial and natural influence for want of having claimed it

sooner.

At the period, however, which is now before us, it would be unjust to charge upon the middle class, so recently acknowledged as existing, the imperfect state of national education, and the consequent abortiveness of the first grand struggle for a share of the nation in its government. That state had been determined by a higher, in those times, an irresistible, agency. When Queen Elizabeth had finished what her majesty was pleased to denominate the Protestant Reformation, it became with her a matter of excessive apprehension, lest the import of the term should further suggest some wild and wicked theory of national enlightenment. Our readers are aware of the tyrannical precautions which were resorted to against this apprehended calamity; of these the most remarkable was, the systematic discouragement of original discourses in the church itself: the general substitution of a printed book of Homilies, and the consequent entire preclusion of any new information or instruction being communicated from the clergyman to his assembled flock -the whole service being cast into a set and rigid form, and the minister reduced into a reading-machine. The orthodox ignorance and dulness which was by such means attempted to be rendered permanent, although utterly insufficient to preserve the people from the wholesome fermentation of the following reigns, was yet unhappily but too efficacious in debasing the character of those heresies, which the roused spirit of inquiry could not fail to generate. Of their origin and extent, it is singular that a clearer, though a hostile, view should have been taken by a foreigner than by the far greater number of our native historians. Ne croyez pas," says Bossuet,* que ce soit seulement la querelle de l'épiscopat, ou quelques chicanes sur la liturgie anglicane, qui aient ému les communes; ces disputes n'étaient encore que de faibles commencemens, par où ces esprits turbulents faisaient comme un essai de leur liberté ; mais quelque chose de plus violent se remuait dans le fond des cœurs; c'était un dégout secret de tout ce qui a de l'autorité". (authority over opinion: in other words, the power to persecute); "et une démangeaison d'innover sans fin après qu'on en a vu le premier exemple.'

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Whatever be the tenets of a hierarchy, the certainty and im

* Oraison Funèbre de la Reine d'Angleterre.

portance of such tenets are always carefully impressed upon the popular mind. Hence, whenever, in the progress of intelligence, the people see reason to adopt new doctrines, the twin ideas of importance and certainty still unhappily adhere to their imaginations, although they come to be associated with a new creed in the place of an old one. Hence it happened, at the period we are now treating of, that the Presbyterians, who were the earliest revolters from the Church, retained an ample share of that intolerance which they had imbibed from her precepts and example: while the various sects of Independents, being of later growth, having separated themselves more completely from established modes of faith and discipline, and having equally experienced the persecuting spirit of Episcopalians and of Presbyterians, resolved to lift the standard of religious equality. Hume acknowledges, that "of all Christian sects, this was the first, which, during its prosperity, as well as in its adversity, always adopted the principle of toleration." But Hume ascribes the adoption of this principle entirely to the frenzy of enthusiasm, which scorned all limits of existing creeds.

In Scotland, the spirit of the Reformation had been, if possible, more intolerant and exclusive than in England. A Catholic sovereign had resisted innovation; and the appetite for reform and plunder had arrayed the nobility against the government. The nobility had triumphed with the aid of the people, whose passions had been urged into frenzy by their clergy; a frenzy which the Protestant aristocrats long found it convenient to encourage; which prevailed long after they had ceased to encourage it. It is curious to remark with what comparative submission the nobles acquiesced in the introduction of the bishops into the Scottish parliament, by James I, in which they could perceive a mere invasion of principle; but how fiercely, when the son of that monarch proposed the restitution of the churchlands, they set the royal will at defiance. On the former occasion the clergy and the people had been left alone to fight their own battles; but on the latter, when the substance of the nobles was in danger, they were instantly awake to the importance of forms. Had such particulars been adverted to by Hume, he would scarce have needed to expend so many elegant phrases on "the supernatural and unaccountable nature of the religious spirit, when it mingles with faction."

While the Scottish clergy had adopted all the turbulence of the nobles, the nobles, to their bolder and more natural vices had superadded all the cant of the clergy; so that it is not easy to conceive a more detestable union than was effected by the amalgamating process of interest between the worst and

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