that they might not look at Heaven, and that they might do the purposes of unjust judgments.' But they, though giving a clear, consistent, uncontradicted story, were disappointed, and their victim was rescued from their gripe by the trifling circumstance of a contradiction about a tamarisk tree. Let not men call these contradictions or those falsehoods which false witnesses swear to from needless and heedless falsehood, not going to the main body of the case, but to the main body of the credit of the witnesses-let not men rashly and blindly call these things accidents. They are just rather than merciful dispensations of that Providence which wills not that the guilty should triumph, and which favourably protects the innocent.

Such, my Lords, is the case now before you! Such is the evidence in support of the measure-evidence inadequate to prove a debt-impotent to deprive of a civil right-ridiculous to convict of the lowest offence-monstrous to ruin the honour, to blast the name of an English queen! What shall I say, then, if this is the proof by which an act of judicial legislation, a parliamentary sentence, an ex post facto law, is sought to be passed against this defenceless woman? My Lords, I pray you to pause. I do earnestly beseech you to take heed! You are standing upon the brink of a precipice; then beware! It will go forth your judgment, if sentence shall go against the queen. But it will be the only judgment you ever pronounced which, instead of reaching its object, will return and bound back upon those who gave it. Save the country, my Lords, from the horrors of this catastrophe-save yourselves from this peril; rescue that country of which you are the ornaments, but in which you can flourish no longer when severed from the people than the blossom when cut off from the roots and the stem of the tree. Save that country, that you may continue to adorn it; save the Crown, which is in jeopardy; the Aristocracy, which is shaken; save the Altar, which must stagger with the blow that rends its kindred Throne. You have said, my Lords, you have willed-the Church and the King have willed-that the queen should be deprived of its solemn service. She has, instead of that solemnity, the heartfelt prayers of the people. She wants no prayers of mine. But I do here pour forth my humble supplications at the throne of mercy, that that mercy may be poured down upon the people in a larger measure than the merits of their rulers may deserve, and that your hearts may be turned to justice!

On Law Reform.

The course is clear before us; the race is glorious to run. You have the power of sending your name down through all times, illustrated by deeds of higher fame and more useful import than ever were done within these walls. You saw the greatest warrior of the ageconqueror of Italy-humbler of Germany-terror of the North-saw him account all his matchless victories poor, compared with the triumph you are now in a condition to win-saw him contemn the fickleness of Fortune, while, in despite of her, he could pronounce his memorable boast: 'I shall go down to posterity with the Code in my hand.' You have vanquished him in the field; strive now to rival him in the sacred arts of peace! Outstrip him as a lawgiver, whom in arms you overcame! The lustre of the Regency will be eclipsed by the more solid and enduring splendour of the Reign.

The praise which false courtiers feigned for our Edwards and Harrys, the Justinians of their day, will be the just tribute of the wise and the good to that monarch under whose sway so mighty an undertaking shall be accomplished. Of a truth, the holders of sceptres are most chiefly to be envied for that they bestow the power of thus conquering and ruling. It was the boast of Augustus-it formed part of the glare in which the perfidies of his earlier years were lost-that he found Rome of brick and left it of marble; a praise not unworthy a great prince, and to which the present also has its claims. But how much nobler will be the sovereign's boast when he shall have it to say that he found law dear and left it cheap; found it a sealed book, left it a living letter; found it the patrimony of the rich, left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the twoedged sword of craft and oppression, left it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence !

(From Speech in Parliament in 1828.) Amongst his one hundred and thirty-three works (11 vols. 1855-61, without the Autobiography, 1871; 2nd ed. 1873) are a Discourse on Natural Theology; an edition of Paley; a translation of Demosthenes' Peri tou Stephanou; Historical Sketches of Statesmen of the Time of George III.; Political Philosophy; Lives of Men of Letters and Science of the Time of George III.; History of England and France under the House of Lancaster; besides select cases, speeches, and tracts on scientific subjects and law reform.

John, Lord Campbell (1779-1861), Lord Chancellor of England, was a son of the parish minister of Cupar- Fife; but he could trace his descent from the Earl of Argyll who fell at Flodden, and, through his mother, from the fourteenth-century Regent Albany. He studied for the ministry at St Andrews University, became (1798) a tutor in London, joined Lincoln's Inn (1800), read law and acted as reporter and dramatic critic to the Morning Chronicle, and was called to the Bar in 1806. His nisi prius 'Reports' (1808) brought him into notice, and by 1824 he was leader of the Oxford circuit. A King's Counsel in 1827, Whig M.P. successively for Stafford and for Dudley, he was made Solicitor-General and knighted in 1832. Attorney-General in 1834, he was defeated at Dudley, but returned for Edinburgh. Created Lord Campbell (1841), he was for six weeks Lord Chancellor of Ireland; and became successively Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1846), Chief-Justice of the Queen's Bench (1850), and Lord Chancellor of England (1859). A courteous and painstaking judge, as a legislator he carried through Parliament statutes on defamation, compensation for death by accident, and against obscene publications. His Lives of the Chief-Justices (1849-57) and of the Lord Chancellors (1845-47) have become, in spite of their notorious faults, a part of English literature; though readable and full of novel and entertaining matter and good stories, they are disfigured by the obtrusion of himself, and in the later volumes by ungenerous misconstruction, the assignment of base motives, and an inaccuracy convenient for his own arguments. He borrowed freely without acknowledgment; what looks like malice is probably at times only carelessness; and

it has been argued in palliation of his unkindest cuts that he had become blunted in his own feelings. Professor Gardiner and Mr Bass Mullinger, speaking with deliberation in their Introduction to English History, say the Lives of the Chancellors is throughout 'wanting in a due sense of the obligations imposed by such a task, is disfigured by unblushing plagiarisms, and, as the writer approaches his own times, by much unscrupulous misrepresentation.' No doubt the uncomplimentary anecdotes and stinging remarks added to the vivacity of the Lives. Repeating Arbuthnot's bon-mot on Curll's biographies, Sir Charles Wetherell declared of Campbell that 'his noble and biographical friend had added a new terror to death.' In the supplementary volume of the Chancellors (vol. vii.), published after Campbell's death, his characteristic faults are seen at their worst.

The following from his Life of Brougham will show the tone which irritated the subjects of his biographies and their friends:

As a specimen of his 'Introductions,' I give an extract from that to his 'Speech at the Liverpool Election in 1812. [In the extract a parliamentary colleague of Brougham's is said to have abhorred the spirit of intrigue which not rarely gave some inferior man or some busy meddling woman, probably unprincipled, a sway in the destiny of the party fatal to its success and all but fatal to its character.']

If all this were true, it surely comes very ungraciously from one who had been a member of the Whig party above twenty years, and who, within two years, had passionately wished to continue in it. The lady he so uncourteously refers to is evidently Lady Holland, the wife of his friend Lord Holland, his early patron on his first coming to London-at whose hospitable board I have often met him. Although Lady Holland certainly had considerable influence in Whig councils, I do not believe that it was ever exercised against Brougham. But he was of a different opinion, and he would never afterwards speak to her, for although he could forgive Lord Melbourne, he could not forgive her, who was supposed to have been Lord Melbourne's adviser in excluding him. In the session of 1838 Brougham carried on very active hostilities against Lord Melbourne's Government, still showing Radical colours, but more and more sympathising and coming to an implied understanding with the Duke of Wellington, Lord Lyndhurst, and the Tories. They accused us of a disposition to revolutionise both Church and State from the proposed measure about Church Rates, and the practical admission of Roman Catholics to a fair share of power and patronage in Ireland, whereas Brougham still denounced us as Reac tionaries, Finalists, and Mock Reformers because we resisted for the present any further organic change. Being taunted by Lord Melbourne for his bitter opposition to those with whom he had so long acted, and whom he had so zealously patronised in the year 1835, when he was no longer in office and they were pursuing the same policy as at present, he insisted that they had diverged, while he was marching straight forward.

It is possible that he had worked himself into the belief that he was acting consistently and from purely disinterested motives; but, if so, he stood alone in this

belief, for all the rest of mankind agreed that revenge was the mainspring of his conduct, and that his only consideration was how he might most spite and damage those by whom he had been ill-used. The Radicals making great play against the Government by the opposition which Ministers offered to the ballot - although he was one of the framers of the Reform Bill who had peremptorily objected to the proposal of his colleagues Lord Durham and Sir James Graham to admit the ballot, and so late as his famous Scottish 'Progress,' complaining of the unreasonable Radicals, he had intimated an opinion that rather too much had been done in the way of innovation-he now expressly recommended the ballot, and told the Lords that unless their Lordships made up their minds either to this measure or some measure of this sort for the protection of electors, it would be carried against them. The time appeared to him to be come when something must be done. The sooner, therefore, their Lordships made up their minds to some such measure as this, the better it would be for them.' The Tories did not vocally cheer, but they showed by their radiant countenances and sparkling eyes with what delight they heard observations which had such a tendency to disparage the Whigs, to deprive the Government of Liberal support, and to accelerate their own return to power. Although they and their irregular ally appeared on opposite sides of the House, there was between them during the debate a quick interchange of nods and winks and wreathed smiles, followed by much approving raillery and cordial gratulation when the debate was over.

The great practical measure of this session was the Bill for the Better Government of the Canadas. There had been an open rebellion in Lower Canada, and its Legislative Assembly had thrown off allegiance to the English Crown. The insurgents had been defeated, and tranquillity had been restored; but a change in the mode of ruling the colony was universally allowed to be indispensable, and there was a necessity for conferring extraordinary powers on Lord Durham, who in the emergency had patriotically agreed to go out as Governor. Even the Duke of Wellington and Lord Lyndhurst concurred in the principle of the bill, although they censured some of its details. But Brougham furiously opposed the bill, and every clause of it-his animosity on this occasion being sharpened by a special grudge fostered by him against Lord Durham, who in the year 1834 had charged him with having become a very cool Reformer, and 'little better than a Conservative.' In a great speech upon the subject which, according to his custom, he published as a pamphlet, with a Preface praising himself and vilifying others, he gave a narrative of the measures of the Government at home to meet the spirit of insubordination in Canada, and he thus censured their inaction in the summer of 1837. . . . This somewhat cumbrous jocularity may have been produced by pure patriotism, but I must confess it seems to me rather an ebullition of envy, and that the pseudo-patriot was resenting his own exclusion from the luxurious banquet spread for the famished Whigs at the accession of Queen Victoria.

The Lives have passed through many editions both in Britain and in America. Lord Campbell's wife, a daughter of Lord Abinger, was created Baroness Stratheden (1836). There is a Life of the Chancellor by his daughter, the Hon. Mrs Hardcastle, containing autobiographical materials, diary, and letters (1881).

Henry Hallam (1777-1859), son of the Dean of Wells, was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple. He was early appointed a Commissioner of Stamps, a well-paid office which, with his private means, secured him a sufficient income and allowed him to withdraw from legal practice and prosecute those studies on which his fame rests. 'Classic Hallam, much renowned for Greek,' as Byron called him, was an early and important contributor to the Edinburgh Review. His View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818), a series of dissertations on European history from the fifth to the end of the fifteenth century, at once gave him a front rank amongst English historians, and procured for him the honours of D.C.L. and F.R.S. In 1827 he published The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of George II.; and in 1837-38 an Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries. With vast stores of knowledge and indefatigable application, Hallam possessed a clear and independent judgment, and a style grave and impressive, though somewhat lacking in vivacity, colour, warmth, and sympathy. His Introduction to the Literature of Europe is a great monument of his erudition, though it is impossible for any man to be infallible on such a wide field; and his judgments on literature were less original and less permanently valuable than his epoch-making work in constitutional history. He insisted on the necessity of studying the original sources of history, and helped to found an English historical school. His works must still be consulted by the student, though they can hardly be popular with the general reader. His views of political questions were those generally adopted by the Whig party; but though stated with calmness and moderation, they provoked Southey and all Tories and HighChurchmen to wrath, and, on the other hand, secured Macaulay's enthusiastic laudation. He was peculiarly a supporter of principles, not of men, and was eminently judicial and judicious in his estimates, though somewhat insular in his sympathies and outlook. In the Literature of Europe, though there too we seem to deal with shades rather than with living men of like passions with ourselves, there is at times something more of feeling and imagination, a more sympathetic tone, than could have been anticipated from the calm, unimpassioned tenor of Hallam's historic style. Hallam, like Burke, in his latter years 'lived in an inverted order they who ought to have succeeded him had gone before him; they who should have been to him as posterity were in the place of ancestors.' His eldest son, Arthur Henry Hallam-the subject of Tennyson's In Memoriam-died in 1833; and another son, Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam, was taken from him, shortly after he had been called to the Bar, in 1850. Hallam wrote a memoir of his eldest son, prefixed to a collection of his literary remains

science and art, and the constellation of scholars and poets, of architects and painters, whose reflected beams cast their radiance around his head. His political reputation, though far less durable, was in his own age as conspicuous as that which he acquired in the history of letters. Equally active and sagacious, he held his way through the varying combinations of Italian policy, always with credit, and generally with success. Florence, if not enriched, was upon the whole aggrandised during his administration, which was exposed to some severe storms from the unscrupulous adversaries, Sixtus IV. and Ferdinand of Naples, whom he was compelled to resist. As a patriot, indeed, we never can bestow upon Lorenzo de' Medici the meed of disinterested virtue. He completed that subversion of the Florentine republic which his two immediate ancestors had so well prepared. The two councils, her regular legislature, he superseded by a permanent senate of seventy persons; while the gonfalonier and priors, become a mockery and pageant to keep up the illusion of liberty, were taught that in exercising a legitimate authority without the sanction of their prince, a name now first heard at Florence, they

incurred the risk of punishment for their audacity. Even the total dilapidation of his commercial wealth was repaired at the cost of the State; and the republic disgracefully screened the bankruptcy of the Medici by her own. But, compared with the statesmen of his age, we can reproach Lorenzo with no heinous crime. He had many enemies; his descendants had many more; but no unequivocal charge of treachery or assassination has been substantiated against his memory. By the side of Galeazzo or Ludovico Sforza, of Ferdinand or his son Alfonso of Naples, of the Pope Sixtus IV., he shines with unspotted lustre. So much was Lorenzo esteemed by his contemporaries that his premature death has frequently been considered as the cause of those unhappy revolutions that speedily ensued, and which his foresight would, it was imagined, have been able to prevent; an opinion which, whether founded in probability or otherwise, attests the common sentiment about his character.

If indeed Lorenzo de' Medici could not have changed the destinies of Italy, however premature his death may appear if we consider the ordinary duration of human existence, it must be admitted that for his own welfare, perhaps for his glory, he had lived out the full measure of his time. An age of new and uncommon revolutions was about to arise, among the earliest of which the temporary downfall of his family was to be reckoned. The long-contested succession of Naples was again to involve Italy in war. The ambition of strangers was once more to desolate her plains.

So long as the three great nations of Europe were unable to put forth their natural strength through internal separation or foreign war, the Italians had so little to dread for their independence that their policy was altogether directed to regulating the domestic balance of power among themselves. In the latter part of

the fifteenth century a more enlarged view of Europe would have manifested the necessity of reconciling petty animosities and sacrificing petty ambition in order to preserve the nationality of their governments; not by attempting to melt down Lombards and Neapolitans, principalities and republics, into a single monarchy, but by the more just and rational scheme of a common federation. The politicians of Italy were abundantly competent, as far as cool and clear understandings could render them, to perceive the interests of their country. But it is the will of Providence that the highest and surest wisdom, even in matters of policy, should never be unconnected with virtue. In relieving himself from an immediate danger, Ludovico Sforza overlooked the consideration that the presumptive heir of the king of France claimed by an ancient title that principality of Milan which he was compassing by usurpation and murder. But neither Milan nor Naples was free from other claimants than France, nor was she reserved to enjoy unmolested the spoil of Italy. A louder and a louder strain of warlike dissonance will be heard from the banks of the Danube and from the Mediterranean gulf. The dark and wily Ferdinand, the rash and lively Maximilian, are preparing to hasten into the lists; the schemes of ambition are assuming a more comprehensive aspect; and the controversy of Neapolitan succession is to expand into the long rivalry between the houses of France and Austria. But here, while Italy is still untouched, and before as yet the first lances of France gleam along the defiles of the Alps, we close the history of the Middle Ages.

(From the State of Europe.)

Execution of Charles I.

The execution of Charles I. has been mentioned in later ages by a few with unlimited praise-by some with faint and ambiguous censure-by most with vehement reprobation. My own judgment will possibly be anticipated by the reader of the preceding pages. I shall certainly not rest it on the imaginary sacredness and divine origin of royalty, nor even on the irresponsibility with which the law of almost every country invests the person of its sovereign. Far be it from me to contend that no cases may be conceived, that no instances may be found in history, wherein the sympathy of mankind and the sound principles of political justice would approve a public judicial sentence as the due reward of tyranny and perfidiousness. But we may confidently deny that Charles I. was thus to be singled out as a warning to tyrants. His offences were not, in the worst interpretation, of that atrocious character which calls down the vengeance of insulted humanity, regardless of positive law. His government had been very arbitrary; but it may well be doubted whether any, even of his ministers, could have suffered death for their share in it without introducing a principle of barbarous vindictiveness. Far from the sanguinary misanthropy of some monarchs, or the revengeful fury of others, he had in no instance displayed, nor does the minutest scrutiny since made into his character entitle us to suppose, any malevolent dispositions beyond some proneness to anger and a considerable degree of harshness in his demeanour. As for the charge of having caused the bloodshed of the war, upon which, and not on any former misgovernment, his condemnation was grounded, it was as ill established as it would have been insufficient. Well might the Earl of Northumberland say, when the ordinance for the king's trial was before the Lords, that the greatest part of the people of England were not yet satisfied whether the king levied war first against the Houses, or the Houses against him. The fact, in my opinion, was entirely otherwise. It is quite another question whether the parliament were justified in their resistance to the king's legal authority. But we may contend that when Hotham, by their command, shut the gates of Hull against his sovereign, when the militia was called out in different counties by an ordinance of the two Houses, both of which preceded by several weeks any levying of forces for the king, the bonds of our constitutional law were by them and their servants snapped asunder; and it would be the mere pedantry and chicane of political casuistry to inquire, even if the fact could be better ascertained, whether at Edgehill, or in the minor skirmishes that preceded, the first carbine was discharged by a cavalier or a roundhead. The aggressor in a war is not the first who uses force, but the first who renders force necessary.

But, whether we may think this war to have originated in the king's or the parliament's aggression, it is still evident that the former had a fair cause with the nation, a cause which it was no plain violation of justice to defend. He was supported by the greater part of the Peers, by full one-third of the Commons, by the prin cipal body of the gentry, and a large proportion of other classes. If his adherents did not form, as I think they did not, the majority of the people, they were at least more numerous, beyond comparison, than those who demanded or approved of his death. The steady,

deliberate perseverance of so considerable a body in any cause takes away the right of punishment from the conquerors, beyond what their own safety or reasonable indemnification may require. The vanquished are to be judged by the rules of national, not of municipal law. Hence, if Charles, after having by a course of victories or the defection of the people prostrated all opposition, had abused his triumph by the execution of Essex or Hampden, Fairfax or Cromwell, I think that later ages would have disapproved of their deaths as positively, though not quite as vehemently, as they have of his own. The line is not easily drawn, in abstract reasoning, between the treason which is justly punished and the social schism which is beyond the proper boundaries of law; but the civil war of England seems plainly to fall within the latter description. These objections strike me as unanswerable, even if the trial of Charles had been sanctioned by the voice of the nation through its legitimate representatives, or at least such a fair and full convention as might, in great necessity, supply the place of lawful authority. But it was, as we all know, the act of a bold but very small minority, who, having forcibly expelled their colleagues from parliament, had usurped, under the protection of a military force, that power which all England reckoned illegal. I cannot perceive what there was in the imagined solemnity of this proceeding, in that insolent mockery of the forms of justice, accompanied by all unfairness and inhumanity in its circumstances, which can alleviate the guilt of the transaction; and if it be alleged that many of the regicides were firmly persuaded in their consciences of the right and duty of condemning the king, we may surely remember that private murderers have often had the same apology.

In discussing each particular transaction in the life of Charles, as of any other sovereign, it is required by the truth of history to spare no just animadversion upon his faults; especially where much art has been employed by the writers most in repute to carry the stream of public prejudice in an opposite direction. But when we come to a general estimate of his character, we should act unfairly not to give their full weight to those peculiar circumstances of his condition in this worldly scene which tend to account for and extenuate his failings. The station of kings is, in a moral sense, so unfavourable that those who are least prone to servile admiration should be on their guard against the opposite error of an uncandid severity. There seems no fairer method of estimating the intrinsic worth of a sovereign than to treat him as a subject, and to judge, so far as the history of his life enables us, what he would have been in that more private and happier condition from which the chance of birth has excluded him. Tried by this test, we cannot doubt that Charles I. would have been not altogether an amiable man, but one deserving of general esteem; his firm and conscientious virtues the same, his deviations from right far less frequent than upon the throne. It is to be pleaded for this prince that his youth had breathed but the contaminated air of a profligate and servile court-that he had imbibed the lessons of arbitrary power from all who surrounded him- that he had been betrayed by a father's culpable blindness into the dangerous society of an ambitious, unprincipled favourite. To have maintained so much correctness of morality as his enemies confess, was a proof of Charles's virtuous dispositions; but his advocates are compelled also to

own that he did not escape as little injured by the poisonous adulation to which he had listened. Of a temper by nature, and by want of restraint, too passionate, though not vindictive, and, though not cruel, certainly deficient in gentleness and humanity, he was entirely unfit for the very difficult station of royalty, and especially for that of a constitutional king. It is impossible to excuse his violations of liberty on the score of ignorance, especially after the Petition of Right; because his impatience of opposition from his council made it unsafe to give him any advice that thwarted his determination. His other great fault was want of sincerity-a fault that appeared in all parts of his life, and from which no one who has paid the subject any attention will pretend to exculpate him. Those indeed who know nothing but what they find in Hume may believe, on Hume's authority, that the king's contemporaries never deemed of imputing to him any deviation from good faith; as if the whole conduct of the parliament had not been evidently founded upon a distrust which on many occasions they very explicitly declared. But, so far as this insincerity was shown in the course of his troubles, it was a failing which untoward circumstances are apt to produce, and which the extreme hypocrisy of many among his adversaries might sometimes palliate. Few personages in history, we should recollect, have had so much of their actions revealed and commented upon as Charles; it is perhaps a mortifying truth that those who have stood highest with posterity have seldom been those who have been most accurately known.

(From the Constitutional History.)

Shakspeare's Self-retrospection.

There seems to have been a period of Shakspeare's life when his heart was ill at ease, and ill content with the world and his own conscience; the memory of hours misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited, the experience of man's worser nature, which intercourse with unworthy associates, by choice or circumstances, peculiarly teaches: these, as they sank into the depths of his great mind, seem not only to have inspired into it the conception of Lear and Timon, but that of one primary character, the censurer of mankind. This type is first seen in the philosophic melancholy of Jaques, gazing with an undiminished serenity, and with a gaiety of fancy, though not of manners, on the follies of the world. It assumes a graver cast in the exiled Duke of the same play, and next one rather more severe in the Duke of Measure for Measure. In all these, however, it is merely contemplative philosophy. In Hamlet this is mingled with the impulses of a perturbed heart under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances; it shines no longer, as in the former characters, with a steady light, but plays in fitful coruscations amidst feigned gaiety and extravagance. In Lear it is the flash of sudden inspiration across the incongruous imagery of madness; in Timon it is obscured by the exaggerations of misanthropy. These plays all belong to nearly the same period: As You Like It being usually referred to 1600, Timon to the same year, Measure for Measure to 1603, and Lear to 1604. In the later plays of Shakspeare, especially in Macbeth and the Tempest, much of moral speculation will be found, but he has never returned to this type of character in the personages.

(From the Literature of Europe.)