His lack of Moral Earnestness.

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which we need not trouble ourselves to quote. After what he has read, our reader will, we think, coincide with the censure we think due to Mr. De Quincey's taste, and will feel no surprise at hearing of the ""jaw"-we are really ashamed to write itof Demosthenes and Cicero, at being informed that the Greek Fathers, including Gregory Nazianzen and Chrysostom, were mere Birmingham rhetoricians,' and that Robert Hall and 'Edward Irving, when printed, exhibit only the spasms of 'weakness.'

But greater than any or than all the other evils with which opium-eating cursed De Quincey was this, that it produced an utter confusion of the moral judgment and took away from him all moral earnestness. A man with a task and purpose before him, and who when he had found a thing to do did it with his might, was inexplicable to De Quincey, could not be in any way comprehended by him, and appeared at best diabolically in ' earnest,' fanatical, crazed. The first phrase he uses to describe Dr. Arnold; of fanatics he found several; and of persons addicted to crazes' he met many. He might have gone through the world thanking God with much more reason than the inventor of the bad phrase, 'that he had as few settled con'victions as any man of his acquaintance.' It would be easy to prove what we have above said, over and over again; but as it can, after what we have already said and quoted, scarcely need proving, we shall refer only to a single paper of De Quincey's, and that but briefly. No man could have written about Rhetoric as Mr. De Quincey has written, who had any proper sense of moral obligation, or any comprehension of either the perspicacity of persons not addicted to opium, or of their average sense of right and wrong. Though writing with Archbishop Whately's treatise before him, he insists with the greatest confidence that 'where conviction begins the field of rhetoric ends; and, as to 'the passions, we contend that they are not within the province ' of rhetoric, but of eloquence: a decision and discrimination which are as puerile and superficial as they are dogmatical. A little later he writes, Whatever is certain, or matter of fixed 'science, can be no subject for the rhetorician: where it is possi'ble for the understanding to be convinced, no field is open for ' rhetorical persuasion.' But surely it is very possible for men's understandings to be convinced in many cases in which they are not convinced; and undoubtedly many remain unconvinced simply for want of a clear and just statement of the relevant arguments. Now that method of statement may surely have a name: it has committed no such unpardonable sin, we hope, that it must needs wander through the whole world of letters for ever

hiding itself under the changing guises of periphrasis. It is generally agreed of late years to speak of it as rhetoric, and thus to exalt that art above the degradation into which the non-moral writers of many centuries had cast it. There may be false rhetoric, assuredly, just as there may be counterfeit sovereigns; but that is no reason why the name should be taken from the true and made the exclusive property of the false. Strictly speaking, there is a rhetorical way of stating even a geometrical demonstration, and Euclid always adheres to it; for the right way, the convincing way, is the way of the true and honest rhetorician. To be eloquent is not to use fine words, but to speak or write so as to gain the end of speaking or writing. But to Mr. De Quincey it seems positively that eloquence is nothing better than the "overflow of powerful feelings upon occasions fitted to excite 'them.' Rhetoric, however, appears to him not even so much as that, but to be only the art of aggrandizing and bringing into 'strong relief, by means of various and striking thoughts, some aspect of truth which of itself is supported by no spontaneous 'feelings, and therefore rests upon artificial aids.' Of course we could not consider it unpardonable in Mr. De Quincey to attach to the word rhetoric a different signification from that we attach to it ourselves. But it is not a question of mere words or meaning. The thing is this: if Mr. De Quincey regarded rhetoric as the dishonest contrivance he describes, it was not worth his attention unless with a view to expose it. So far, however, from exposing it, he lets drop not a single word that would lead one to suppose he attached any moral significance to anything belonging to it.* In like manner through all his other writings. There is one word that never comes near them, and apparently never troubled the author of them: that word is Duty. We say it with extreme regret, but the truth is, we do not see how a

*In confirmation of our view as to the singular confusion of Mr. De Quincey as to moral obligation and morality generally, we quote the following from his Appendix to an edition of the Confessions,' dated 1853. The Appendix itself is dated 1822. It prefaces an acknowledgment that his vaunted triumph' was never achieved, and may certainly be taken as a warrant for the author's qualifications for discussing the artifices of which, according to himself, rhetoric always consists. Those who have read the "Confessions" will have closed them with 'the impression that I had wholly renounced the use of opium. This impression I meant to convey, and that for two reasons: first, because the very act of deliberately recording such a state of suffering necessarily presumes in the recorder a power of surveying his own case as a cool spectator, and a degree of spirits for adequately describing it, which it would be inconsistent to suppose in 'any person speaking from the situation of an actual sufferer; secondly, because I, who had descended from so large a quantity as 8,000 drops to so small a one (comparatively speaking) as a quantity ranging between 300 and 160 drops, 'might well suppose that the victory was in effect achieved.' The fact of the case seems to have been simply what Mrs. Gordon stated. Well might De Quincey consider himself a casuist.

English Constitution since the Accession of Geo. III. 29 man with any sense of this could either have written what Mr. De Quincey has written, or have done, under like conditions of time and faculty, so little as Mr. De Quincey has done. He took opium at first to mitigate pain: he continued to take it as a merely sensational gratification. It made him, as we fear, little better than an artist, and, in his own degraded sense of the word, little better than a rhetorician. In a life of nearly seventy-five years, dedicated from childhood to the pursuits of the scholar and the man of letters, he achieved and secured for himself neither the respect and affection of his contemporaries, nor the making of his fame with posterity, but simply a byname which we trust may never be challenged by another, THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER,

ART. II.-The Constitutional History of England since the Accession of George III. 1760-1860. By THOMAS ERSKINE MAY, C.B. Two Vols. London: 1861-1863.

A BOOK such as this has been long wanting, and the volumes before us supply the want, although they do not quite conform to our ideal of Constitutional History. Mr. Hallam has made this generation familiar with the progress of our political system from Saxon times to the reign of George III.; and in treatises of conspicuous merit he has traced the gradual expansion of our institutions until they attained that specific type which the Revolution impressed upon them. He has shown how the seeds of English liberty were sown in the ancient Saxon customs, and, though overlaid in their fair growth, by the pressure of the Norman Conquest, how at length they revived and bore fruit in the England of our Plantagenet monarchs. He has pointed out how the ruin of feudalism, and the great changes of the sixteenth century, deprived our mediæval polity of many of its principal securities; and how, until after the Civil War, the usurpations of the Crown and the Church destroyed the balance of our Constitution. From thence he has unfolded the changes which culminated in 1688, when the establishment of a new dynasty and the settlement of Parliamentary government put an end to kingly absolutism in England, assured to her representative institutions, made her Constitution an aristocratic Commonwealth, and secured to Englishmen many of their liberties. And, incidentally with this great development, Mr. Hallam has traced the external growth of the British Empire in its various parts; and has noted accurately the forces and influ

ences, political, social, religious, and commercial, which continued to form our national life until the middle of the last century.

In following up Mr. Hallam's work, and tracing our Constitutional History from 1760 to the present period, Mr. May has done a valuable service to the student of our modern polity. It is true that when Mr. Hallam leaves us the limited monarchy and the Parliamentary government of England have been fully established; that her cardinal institutions have been fixed; that her national tendencies are clearly marked; and that the changes in our Constitution which have taken place within a century, are slight compared with those which preceded them. But if we remember that during this period Parliamentary and Municipal Reform have been witnessed; that a material progress and an intellectual activity unknown in any previous age have created interests and influences among us which our greatgrandfathers never dreamed of; that the Empire has been not only augmented and numerous provinces added to it, but that its colonial system has been metamorphosed; and that social improvement, Free Trade, the diffusion of enlightenment and education, the expansion of civil and religious liberty, and the reformation of our municipal law, have been among the fruits of this time we shall readily acknowledge that a supplement to Mr. Hallam's works was necessary. And looking at these volumes as a whole, we are happy to say that Mr. May has performed his task with much ability. He is an accurate and diligent collector of facts, and he sets them forth in a pleasing his judgments upon them are remarkably sound; and his views on social and political questions are eminently liberal, just, and generous. But he is somewhat wanting in depth of thought and in the faculty of generalization; and he does not possess the art of combining his materials in an harmonious unity. The result is, that while his chapters on the different parts of our Constitution are admirable essays viewed separately, his work wants completeness of execution, and he is not able to reproduce for us a vivid image of the polity of Great Britain, or to show how its complex machinery works together in combined action.

Mr. May's volumes open with a review of the status of the Crown since the accession of George III., and of its influence within the Constitution. We wish that this review had been prefaced by a sketch of our polity, as a whole, towards the middle of the last century. We wish that Mr. May had brought before us the correlation and mutual dependence of the Monarchy under the House of Hanover, deprived of the divinity of kingship, yet not the less with elements of power-of the oligarchic Par

General Character of the Work.

31

liaments of the days of Walpole, well-nigh severed from the influence of opinion, yet in a certain sense representative and popular-of the Church, formidable in her legal ascendency, yet surrounded by a vigorous Nonconformity, which, though subject to galling disabilities, was nevertheless to a great extent free-and of a people as yet in semi-feudal dependence, yet, on the whole, not ill governed, and wanting only the spread of education to advance socially and politically. We wish that he had given us a picture of the old colonial government of England while the mercantile system still flourished, and had pointed out how Scotland and Ireland-the one but lately devastated by rebellion, the other in the bonds of sectarian domination—were as yet really disunited from the Empire. And a vivid description of the social state of England when George III. was young would have been at this point of special value, inasmuch as it is in this particular that the national progress has been greatest, and the influence of this silent change has told most powerfully on our institutions. Perhaps, however, a sketch such as this at once vigorous and comprehensive-was beyond the scope of Mr. May; and if so he was right not to attempt it; though it must be confessed that his method of treating our polity in its separate parts, without reference to its action as a whole, makes his work rather a political anatomy than in a high sense a Constitutional History.

Mr. May's chapters, however, upon the influence of the Crown during the last century, and his account of the effects of that influence, are very just and valuable in their conclusions. He observes correctly, that while the Revolution not only made the Houses of Parliament the supreme legislative power in the State, but also armed the House of Commons with a potent control over the Executive, it nevertheless left the Crown in possession of the actual executive government, and as such with immense authority. The Sovereign was the visible source of power: he commanded the armaments of the State; he was the nominal author of peace and war; and every positive exercise of Government, from dissolving Parliament to instituting a prosecution, was done in his name and with his supposed sanction. Besides these legal and imposing prerogatives, the Sovereign moreover had as natural allies an ascendant Church, of which he was the head, and an aristocracy of enormous influence predominant in the national councils; and, as the fountain of honour and office, he possessed a fund of wide-spread patronage, the effects of which need no comment. Accordingly the Revolution, even in theory, intrusted the Crown with great powers; and if we remember that their exercise was subjected in the