redeemed their character at home, and obtained a conveyance to Australia at the expiration of their term, or perhaps, under especially favourable circumstances, even earlier. And if in that new sphere of action some be found to relapse, the local authorities can but deal with them (as relapsing convicts would be dealt with at home,) by consigning them to a lasting confinement in some of those auxiliary settlements to which at present the perpetrators of crimes in Australia are condemned, and in which, as in all the prisons of the mother country, we would have the Philadelphian system as far as possible observed. The conveyance of the reformed convicts from home to New South Wales should, on the system we now advocate, be made matter of indulgence, depending upon conduct and character. Nor must the expense be thrown ultimately either upon the mother country or upon the colony; because, if convicts were enabled to emigrate for their own profit at the public charge, they might be placed in a better situation than men who have never offended; it must, therefore, be made condition of their conveyance that the passage-money advanced for them by the government shall be repaid from their labour in the colony, by stopping a reasonable proportion of their earnings until the advance be liquidated. With ordinary emigrants this arrangement is not easily enforced, because there is no privity between the master who employs the labourers and the local goernment which has to get its payment out of their earnings; but with a body of convicts, whose labour would be under control, the same difficulty would not exist-especially a body of selected and tractable convicts like those who, on this plan, would be the only class exported by the government.

ART. VIII.-Life and Administration of Edward First Earl of Clarendon; with Original Correspondence and Authentic Papers never before published. By T. H. Lister, Esq. 3 vols.

Lond. 1838.

W

E readily agree in Mr. Lister's preliminary proposition, that a biography of Lord Clarendon was wanting to our modern iterature, although we are by no means satisfied with his attempt o supply the deficiency. We cannot but express our disappointnent that he should have added so little to our personal knowedge of Lord Clarendon, our dissatisfaction with the general tone of the work, and our strong dissent from many of its details-while we concede to Mr. Lister the merit of a clear and unaffected style -some diligence in exploring at least the surface of the original authorities

authorities honest and not unphilosophical views of general questions-and a kind of impotent candour that strains after an impartiality which his mind has not vigour to attain. Indeed -Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor-would be a very just motto for Mr. Lister's work, of which the most prominent and serious defect is the absence of any fixed principle, a want of moral courage, and a timid and shuffling anxiety to conciliate opinions which are in their essence irreconcileable.

No writer and few statesmen have been subjected to more numerous, more virulent, and more insidious attacks than Lord Clarendon. All the enemies of the monarchical constitution of England have been, and still are, his. The rigid fanaticism of the presbyter, the unctuous bigotry of the Jesuit, and the fraudulent candour of the sceptic, suspend, for a moment, their mortal feuds, in a common enmity to CHURCH and STATE, and to the Noble Historian whose immortal work-whether as a body of facts or as a code of principles-is the strongest bulwark of both that literature has ever erected.

Unable to stem the strong current of its facts, to refute the great principles it develops, or to resist the majestic flow of its eloquence and wisdom, they endeavour to disparage its authority; for, after all, disparagement, and not confutation, is the most that they venture to attempt, by individual charges of partiality and in

accuracy.

A work of such extent and variety-narrating such eventsinvolving such vehement passions and such important interests. written by one who had a large share in those transactions, and who does not pretend to have been exempt from those passions and interests, however he may have subsequently subdued or miti gated them—such a work, we say, would be more than human. if it did not afford occasional instances by which such charges might be plausibly supported. The instances are, however, wonderfully few; no work has ever been exposed to so severe an ordeal with so little substantial damage: and it is very observable that, however this or that writer may indulge his spleen or his prejudice. in carping at some minor details, they all are forced to accept. and to rely on, Lord Clarendon, as the great and indisputable authority for the broader and more important features of their respective narratives. Take from his bitterest critics, what in spite of all their censures, they are forced to borrow implicitly from Clarendon, and you will leave them-nothing. We cannot call to mind, and we do not believe that there exists, a single page of any of those antagonist works which, while it disputes some insulated fact or opinion, is not in all main particulars founded on the en dence of Clarendon. His work is like one of those grand pictures

of Titian or Correggio, which every inferior artist copies for profit or instruction, even while he pretends to discover that some turn of a limb is not accurately drawn, or some fold of the drapery not judiciously coloured. The result is as might be expected; the great original rises with undiminished magnificence above the crowd of copyists and critics; the world at large, captivated by its general truth and beauty, is blind to, or careless of, the alleged defects; and leaves the creeping commentators to settle among themselves, unheeded or disregarded, their futile and often contradictory accusations. We have-as our readers are aware— occasionally, in the course of our critical pursuits, met some of these controversialists, but, with the feeling we have stated, we have no more thought of entering into a detailed defence of Lord Clarendon, than we should of vindicating the sun for being obscured by passing clouds, or even by those real spots on his disk, which cannot be discovered but through a medium of artificial obscurity. The great day-star of our history thus holds his

Course

'Versant des torrens de lumière

Sur ses obscurs blasphémateurs!'

If any writer of a professed life of Lord Clarendon had even inadvertently given countenance to such charges, we should have thought it our duty to examine the evidence on which his admissions might be founded, with that care and scrupulosity which our respect for Lord Clarendon, and our still higher regard for historic truth, would suggest-but this duty is rendered infinitely more imperative and more important in Mr. Lister's very peculiar position. His alliance* with the existing house of Clarendonhis dedication of his work to the present inheritor of that name-the promise in the title-page of information from original correspondences and authentic documents, not before published,' naturally lead the world to expect that he has undertaken so serious and so delicate a task with no unfavourable disposition towards the founder of that house: and, therefore, while his warmest approbation could add but little to Lord Clarendon's fame, any admission of a contrary character which he should make must be of the most injurious tendency-and would naturally be received at present, and appealed to hereafter, as the reluctant, and of course indisputable evidence of one, who, no

Mr. Lister, as appears from a genealogical table given in the work, has married Theresa Villiers, a niece of the present Lord Clarendon, who belongs to a branch of the house of Jersey, that having intermarried with one of the female descendants of the Chancellor, was, on the extinction of his male line, raised to the earldom of Clarendon.

doubt,

doubt, would have defended Lord Clarendon if, in honour and conscience, he could have done so.

Now Mr. Lister-while he professes, and we believe, really feels, a great respect for Lord Clarendon, and shows on some occa sions a natural interest in his fame-has not only made many such injurious admissions, but he has adduced several new and gratui tous charges, most, we might say all, of which, we believe to be either entirely unfounded or founded on misapprehension, and equally unjustifiable in fact and in reasoning. This strange inconsistency, which is the first thing that will strike any reader of Mr. Lister's work, arises, we are sorry to believe, from the disingenuous affectation of impartiality to which we have alludedfrom a kind of morbid or selfish candour, which would purchase a little personal popularity from Lord Clarendon's antagonists at Lord Clarendon's expense-and from a desire to propitiate his own Whig patrons,* by a sour and depreciatory tone (for it is more tone than substance) towards the great Tory statesmanfor a Tory we admit he was in feeling and principles, before the name had received its present meaning.

Before we enter on the details which have suggested and must justify the foregoing observations, we must say a few words on the general composition of the work. Every body, we believe, re ceived its announcement with great pleasure, in the expectation that, from his peculiar circumstances, Mr. Lister was likely to possess something of private anecdote and domestic history, which, with the already published Life and documents, would compose a complete biography. In this, we think, not unnatural hope, we have been entirely disappointed. There is not a vestige of any family information-and as to the unpublished documents, for the use of which Mr. Lister expresses so much gratitude to various persons,' we do not find that they have produced one single new fact, and hardly the illustration of an old one. whole of what is derived from these sources were to be abstracted from the work, it would not, we believe, be diminished in its bulk by ten pages, or in its value by tenpence.

If the

The whole of the third volume does indeed consist of unpublished papers, but they are, with few exceptions, extracted from the mass of Clarendon Papers in the Bodleian Library, long a cessible to the public, and to which Mr. Lister was, as he fairly

e, ir

* Mr. Lister's sister is married to Lord John Russell, and he is, we presume, in debted to his lordship's patronage for the office (alluded to in his preface) of Register General, created by that spiteful piece of legislation which, under pretence of affording relief to the dissenters in the registration of births, deaths, and marriages, is a real persecution of the members of the Church of England.

states,

states, directed by the editors of the Clarendon State Papers, who, limiting their publication to the period of the Restoration, indicated that they left unpublished a vast profusion of documents relating to the seven succeeding years of Lord Clarendon's administration. We by no means complain of the publication of these papers, and least of all of the few that are taken from private collections; on the contrary, we are grateful for them, as a valuable supplement to the published State Papers, and a useful addition (which we could wish still larger) to the general history of the times; but a very small portion of them can be said to be auxiliary to Mr. Lister's principal and proper object, and the whole might, with even more propriety, have been published as a separate volume, than as an appendix to this new biography of Lord Clarendon.

Mr. Lister states, as another motive for his undertaking, the recent publication of the Oxford editions of Clarendon's History and Life, and of the diaries of Evelyn, Pepys, Burton, and Goddard. The two last are hardly worth mentioning as to any assistance derived from them to Mr. Lister's work; but the diaries of Evelyn and Pepys, with the Journals of both Houses of Parliament, of which Mr. Lister has made a diligent but not always sagacious examination, supply almost all of novelty that Mr. Lister has been able to add to the former biographies.

But there is another class of authorities which Mr. Lister introduces with a pomp of eulogy which will afford an instance of the-as we think it-disingenuous spirit in which the work is composed.

'Literature has also been recently enriched by many publications, illustrating the times in which Clarendon lived, disclosing facts, solving doubts, enlarging the field of political speculation, and lightening the difficulties of succeeding labourers in historical research; and every reader must acknowledge the obligations largely due to the historical writings of Godwin, Brodie, Guizot, Lingard, and Hallam.'-Preface, P. xiv.

Now, notwithstanding this large and grateful acknowledgment of obligation, we believe that it would be very difficult to show that he has availed himself of any doubts solved' or any facts disclosed' by these writers; to some of them he occasionally refers, but it is, in almost every important case, not to borrow, but to question and refute their statements. The four English authors happen to be those who have exerted themselves with most zeal in depreciating Lord Clarendon, and true to his trimming system, Mr. Lister thus endeavours to propitiate them and their partizans, and to compensate by a general adulation for he special contradictions, which-always with profound de

ference