cendiary language or to assist it by their military experience; for the cause which triumphed in Vienna on the 6th of October was the cause not only of Hungarian but of Italian, and of German-we may safely say, of European anarchy. So numerous were the applications for passes to leave Vienna, especially for Poles and Magyars going to Cracow and Pesth, on and after the 7th of October, that it was found necessary to appoint seven officers, of whom M. Dunder was one, to assist that branch of the police, and many thousands of emissaries who had taken part in the contest of the 6th of October escaped, as he says, from the city before the day of retribution arrived. Two days later, on the 8th of October, Kossuth was proposed in the Diet at Pesth, by a deputy named Záko, as President of the kingdom of Hungary; and, in accepting that dictatorial office, his power was literally based on the bloody tumult which had just torn out the very heart of the empire.

We are not acquainted with any book, written under similar circumstances of excitement, which displays an equal amount of minuteness and, we believe, of general fairness in the record of such a catastrophe as the journal of M. Dunder; and it may be possible hereafter from it and other materials-especially the evidence before tribunals as gradually made accessible-to give a complete narrative of the unparalleled state of Vienna during a reign of terror which was only terminated by the gallantry and resolution of the army under Prince Windischgrätz-by the determination of the Government to cease their fatal policy of concession to an insatiable mob-and by the resources which the empire at large afforded to the Crown against the anarchy of the capital and the rebellion of one large portion of its dominions. Upon this basis authority was at length restored-and transferred ere long to a youthful and patriotic Emperor, supported and assisted by statesmen of extraordinary energy and activity, who have laboured with indefatigable zeal to repair the injuries of past neglect, to efface the scars of recent revolution, and to promote the regeneration of the Empire on principles not inconsistent with its real wants and with the just requirements of its various populations.

ART.

ART. IX.-Memoirs of the Political and Literary Life of Robert Plumer Ward, Esq., Author of The Law of Nations,' 'Tremaine,'' De Vere,' &c., &c. With Selections from his Correspondence, Diaries, and unpublished Literary Remains. By the Honourable Edmund Phipps. 2 vols. 8vo. 1850.

IN

'N Mr. Ward's last publication (De Clifford, 1841) we find the following remarkable passage:

'My own experience often makes me pity any sincere man who undertakes to record the operations of his own mind in its every day dress. For whatever the virtue or ability of the journalist, ten thousand to one, if he be honest, his pages will depict a great deal of wickedness, a great deal of vanity, or a great deal of folly. What good did the historian of his own heart or of his own actions ever do, except amuse the world by making them laugh at him, or instruct them to avoid by making them hate his faults? Do we want proofs of this? Search the memoirs of [Mlle. de] Montpensier and Madame Roland, who are so good as to reveal their personal charms to the world; or Rousseau, who revealed all his vices; or Laud, who revealed his secret superstition; or Dodington, who seemed to boast of his venality; or Watson, or Cumberland, or Gilbert Wakefield, who, gifted with learning and powerful intellect, disfigured themselves with vanities, in the first two most amusing, in the last most disgusting. "O that mine enemy would write a book!" was the wish of an injured man, panting for revenge. He would have improved upon it had he wished that book a journal. But if he does write one, let him have a care how he publishes it: or shows it, you will say, to a friend who will publish it for him.'

It is certainly singular enough that the next publication from the same pen that wrote this passage should be a journal of the very class thus severely denounced; but we quote it—not as a canon of criticism to be implicitly and rigidly applied either to the authors specified or to Mr. Ward's own case, but because it leads us to conjecture that Mr. Ward may probably in his latter years-perhaps about the time that he was writing De Clifford' have revised his earlier diaries, and by suppression or correction diminished, to his own satisfaction, we may suppose, the objections which he had so sharply registered against such publications. His diaries, as they now appear, fill a large space in these volumes, though illustrating but a small one in Mr. Ward's life. They begin with the formation of Mr. Perceval's Ministry in October, 1809, and are continued to a month before his assassination in May, 1812; there then occurs an interval of near seven years to October, 1819;-and the last extract is dated in November, 1820. Thus covering in all a space of time little exceeding three years and a half, they occupy nearly one-half in bulk, and

certainly

certainly the most valuable half, of Mr. Phipps's compilation. On the suspension of the Diary in 1812 the Editor says:

'Here the Diary breaks off, to be not again resumed till the 27th October, 1819. Whether it were that he was discouraged at the thoughts of the task it would be to fill up the chasm he had allowed to intervene, or that the business of his office, with the necessary Parliamentary attendance, allowed him but little time to employ in this manner, or that it has in fact been continued in some book which is not now to be found, does not appear. The progress of the war at this period was so active, that the spare moments of one holding so important a position in the Ordnance Office would no doubt be few and far between.'vol. i. p. 482.

We rather dissent from this latter opinion. The chasm could not, we think, have been produced by the pressure of public business: for the three or four years of which we have the Diaries were, undoubtedly, the most busy, both in Parliament and in office, of Mr. Ward's whole life; and we therefore suppose either that he did not choose to continue his Journals, or that he came, on a deliberate revision, to the conclusion of 'De Clifford'-that it would be wiser to suppress them. The Editor tells us that he possesses some materials later than 1820, but

"The remaining portion of Mr. Ward's diary, though embracing many curious and interesting political details, and professedly intended for publication, appears to me to comprehend a period too recent to make its continuance expedient. It will be seen by the extracts already given, that he both entertains and expresses very decided opinions as to the political conduct of his opponents, and even occasionally of his own party. I know, too, from the warm kindliness of his nature, he would have been the last to wish that any pain should be given to their surviving connexions, through expressions of opinion which he considered justified, and even required, by the events upon which he was commenting. It is upon this principle that many omissions of names and of particular anecdotes have been determined on, and it is with the same views that I have stopped short at a period when such omissions would too frequently interrupt the continuity of the journal.'-vol. ii. p. 101.

We are a little startled at the expression 'professedly intended for publication,' and we should have liked to have known the precise nature of that profession and to what it exactly applied-for in all the preceding diary there seems, as we read it, nothing like an intention of publication, and the intelligent editor must be well aware how very different must be the complexion, and even the value, of evidence prepared for publication, from the record of a private and contemporaneous impression accidentally brought to light. We believe, with the editor, that Mr. Ward would have

been

been unwilling to give pain to the surviving friends of those on whom he may have passed unfavourable opinions, and we so much approve his own reserve as to the later journals that we should not have complained if he had exercised it earlier. We will not make matters worse by mentioning names unfavourably alluded to, but assuredly there are several 'surviving connexions' of eminent persons who cannot be altogether indifferent to the way in which they are so often ungently, and sometimes even unjustly, dealt with. We do not complain of Mr. Ward. The man, as he himself tells us, and as all who look into themselves must feel, who records his own impressions stamped in the heat of party and the hurry of news-gathering, can hardly avoid speaking harshly of adversaries whose hostile and, as he thinks, culpable acts he sees, but of whose justificatory or palliative motives he is necessarily uninformed; such a man must, we repeat with Mr. Ward himself, be liable to do injustice to others, and frequently to compromise his own claims to sagacity or candour. This is inevitable, and provided there be no malice or bad faith (and certainly Mr. Ward may be acquitted of either), not to be much complained of; for it is only through some such medium, and by a comparison of opposite testimony, that posterity can arrive at anything like the true state of facts-or what in a political view is often more important than even facts-public opinion about them. Men are affected,' says the Grecian moralist, less by facts than by opinions about facts.' We have already more than once discussed the disadvantage in point of delicacy and the advantage in point of truth of an early and frank publication of inculpatory memoirs, and on the whole we (not without considerable hesitation and some important reserves) have arrived at a conclusion in favour of the latter. If there is anything like charge to be produced against a public man, it is better it should appear while either the man himself, or his confidential friends, are at hand to meet, refute, or explain the allegation. While, therefore, we give Mr. Phipps credit for the reserve which, he tells us, he has exercised in some cases, we consider him to have been rather inconsistent in his own views, than blameable in fact, for a few disagreeable personalities which he has permitted to remain in his work; nor are we insensible to the candour and propriety in which, on some occasions, he endeavours to revoke or mitigate the censures pronounced too hastily by his author.

There is another preliminary observation which ought not to be omitted. Mr. Ward, though very intelligent and inquisitive, and living in the best official society, was not (except for the short time he was Under Secretary of State, during which we have no diary) in what is considered confidential office-and had little

VOL. LXXXVII. NO. CLXXIII.

R

or

or no personal share in what we may call the interior working of the higher parts of the political machine, and, indeed, it would seem as if, after the' De Clifford' maxim, he had said or left behind as little as possible about himself: his diaries are therefore for the most part notes of his casual conversations and correspondence with his political acquaintance—mainly made up, in short, of what he himself calls the gossip' of Whitehall or St. Stephen's. This does not render the matter less amusing-but it diminishes the importance and gravity of his censures in some cases, and warns the reader to distinguish between what he relates of his own knowledge, which may always be relied on, and the statements and opinions of which he is merely the echo. With these reserves his journals may be pronounced to be as trust-worthy and authentic as they are in their general tenor amiable and entertaining.

Robert Ward, sixth son of John Ward, a Gibraltar merchant, was born in Mount Street, London, the 19th of March, 1765. His mother, Rebecca Raphael, was a Spaniard of Jewish extraction; but no lively, blue-eyed Saxon ever showed in aspect or manner less indication of his maternal origin. His father realised a large fortune, which was inherited by his eldest son George --the wealthy proprietor of Northwood Place in the Isle of Wight, the father of the late Mr. George Ward of Northwood, and of the late Mr. William Ward, twice M.P. for the city of London. Robert seems to have had the patrimony, more than usually scanty, of a younger son of a large family, but by the kind co-operation of his elder brothers' he was sent to Christ Church, Oxford, and subsequently enabled to eat his way through the Inner Temple to the Bar. Between his leaving Christ Church and being called to the Bar the 18th of June, 1790 (p. 8), he was obliged by an alarming appearance of disease in the knee-joint to proceed to the South of France for the benefit of the waters of Barèges, which seem to have made a complete cure. Mr. Phipps introduces some anecdotes of adventures in France at that very interesting period, but which we cannot well reconcile with the only date that he gives us during the first nine and twenty years of Mr. Ward's life-namely, the call to the Bar in 1790. He states that he had remained in France

'till the horrors and excesses of the French revolution had reached such a height as to threaten even his own personal safety.

6

It happened, unfortunately for him, that another Ward, of about the same age and personal appearance, had incurred the suspicion of the republican party at a moment when suspicion lost all its doubts, and death followed close upon the heels of certainty. To use his own words, "I was arrested for having the same name, and the same coloured coat and waistcoat, as another Ward, guilty of treason; was ordered with

out