educated to think them a part of his trade-royal; and fancied they no more committed his abstract character for truth, than a dealer's excuses to his customers. But if Strafford had been as amiable and conscientious a man as Hampden, and by that means had got more truly into the heart of his master (which I doubt if he ever entered at all), I verily believe Charles would never have had occasion to blush for having given him up. Strafford, after all, was but a kind of hard and unpopular servant,-unpopular, I mean, at court as well as with the people; and in spite of his flatteries, the airs he gave himself must often have annoyed his master, and startled his self-love. Hampden would have been a friend, acceptable with everybody he had come in contact with, and not to be sacrificed but by the abandonment of the same feelings with which Charles loved his family, and respected the daily grounds of his most familiar consolations.

It appears to me, I confess (if I ought to run into these individual criticisms, thus speaking in my own name), that our eloquent, and perhaps I may add, vehement biographer, who nevertheless has contrived to deal out a singular measure of impartiality, considering he is the recorder of such a period, and writes with so much warmth,-has overestimated the character of Wentworth Earl of Strafford, both for dignity and abilities. He is aware of his faults, and denounces them; but is nevertheless so warmed, as he proceeds, into an admiration of his energy, and a sympathy with his elevation and power, that admiting, as all readers must, a large measure of brain in Wentworth, and a superabundance of energy, I cannot but think that the admiration takes too much the place of objection, and that the despot by nature, as well as by office, is held out to us too instinctively as a man fitter for our regard than dissatisfaction. The readers, we think, will be inclined to pronounce that the author's heart is with Eliot, but that he has something in his temperament which is with Strafford. Should reflection finally aid the two in seeing fair play to the great suffering men of those times (for almost all the great ones suffered more or less, of whatever party) he will turn out to be just such a biographer as they wanted; for both on the side of his strength and his weakness, he will have known what it is to "relish all sharply, passion'd as they."*

As a specimen of the occasional eloquence to be found in this first published volume of a writer, who exhibits many proofs of advanced discrimination, and other valuable powers of authorship, the following deeply-felt passage may be given respecting the day when Charles sent down a message to the House, desiring it to enter upon 66 no new business," and the Speaker was ordered by him to interrupt "aspersions on Ministers of State :"

"Events, for passions include events, now crowded together to work their own good work; and the great statesman (Sir John Eliot), the author, as it were, of that awful event, may be conceived to have been the only one who beheld it from the vantage ground of a sober consciousness and control. Into that message his genius had thrown a forecast of the future. The after-terrors he did not live to see, but now concentrated in the present spot were all their intense and fervid elements. THEY STRUGGLED IN THEIR BIRTH WITH TEARS. I do not know whether it may not be thought indecorous and unseemly now for statesmen to shed tears, but I consider the weeping of that memorable day, that black and doleful Thursday,' to have been the precursor of an awful resolve. Had these great men entertained a less severe sense of their coming duty, no such present weakness had been shown. The monarchy, and its cherished associations of centuries, now trembled in the balance. 'Sir Robert Philips spoke,' says a member of the House, writing to his friend the day after, and mingled his words with weeping; Sir Edward Coke, over

Lucky would it have been for Strafford had he had as much heart as our author to perplex, and ultimately enlighten his temperament. Nay, a little sheer occasional weakness (different from that extreme of will which in its consequences amounted to it) would have done him good. Had he been dilatory now and then, or omitted doing something that he had promised, or otherwise rendered it necessary to subject himself to his equals or inferiors, and conciliate their good will, it might have been his salvation. But he went on, making enemies of all the world, even of his own party, except where his notions of what was due to himself influenced him to stand by them; and the consequence was, he walked, like an arrogant, eye-lifting giant, into a pit, and perished miserably.

Let the reader be kind enough to understand me. I am not for taking want of success, in its every-day sense, as the criterion of what is good in a man; no, nor of what deserves to be called even successful. To do so were to blaspheme some of the most sacred names registered in the heart of man. By success, I mean either the success of a cause, for which a man has conscientiously exerted himself; or such jewels of consolation as are left in his possession by conscientious want of success; or lastly, such success itself, in the ordinary sense of the word, (the most desirable, God knows, of all!) which has not injured a man's heart by the way, but conducts him by fortunate paths into a noble rest. On the other hand, as to those who succeed in none of those ways, I do not wish to be understood as contumeliously judging them, or as considering them apart from those excuses of circumstance and education, which every one needs more or less, and which, the more they are needed, show the fellow-creature in a light so much the more to be pitied and excused, as long as he does not throw away pity and excuse by a hardness of heart which proves them to be wasted upon him. But it is perilous to admit into the mind, as objects of its admiration, images of mere energy and will, which represent the brute force of things, or at all events, which set it up as the chief worker, to the displacing of the calm firmness of a Jove, in favour of the loud violence of Mars. Strafford proclaimed the ascendancy of sheer force and violence--he gloried in ithung his faith round its neck-was himself loud-voiced (literally so), bearing down argument by physical violence in his very talk-browbeating his own council-table, and declining (or not knowing how) to conciliate a powerful queen and her favourites. It is true, this was his system; he thought it the only good one for reinstating the king in his authority, or rather for making it purely despotic; and it is claimed for him that he should be judged accordingly. We are desired to consider, not whether his system was to be wished for in the abstract, but whether it was the fit one for his purpose, supposing (as in charity it may be supposed) that his ultimate purpose was good, and that he thought a despotic government the best for the many, as well as for the few. Well then, judging him accordingly, it appears to me that his system was a very shallow one; for in such a country as ours it neither did, nor could come with passion, seeing the desolation that was like to ensue, was forced to sit down when he began to speak, through the abundance of tears; yea, the Speaker in his speech could not refrain from weeping and shedding of tears; besides a great many, whose great griefs made them dumb and silent.'

"A deep silence (continues Mr. Forster) concluded this storm, and the few words that broke the silence startled the House into its accustomed attitude of resolution and composure."-p. 80.

succeed. Strafford split upon the common rock of all inordinate self-lovers: he took himself, or a few like him, for the only understandings extant, and did not see that where any decent measure of education exists, there must be millions of understandings formidably prepared to resist him, and millions more of wills, as strong as his own, all prepared to seize the first opportunity for his destruction. Great Britain, in the time of Charles the First and Milton and Eliot, was not Persia, or Barbary, or Hindostan. It is possible that a man might have won his way into despotism by artful shows of kindness, and a cultivation of the humours of others (such as Hyde attributed to Hampden); or he might have gained it for a time by military prowess and services, as Cromwell did afterwards; but to force it upon a nation full of stout, energetic, reflecting men, who had already begun to look sternly into the weaknesses of government, and had grown up in the manly schools of Luther and Raleigh, the thing was utterly senseless and impracticable, and only showed the inordinate vanity of the speculator. Strafford wanted imagination and heart; and in wanting these, he wanted the first elements of wisdom for others, and for himself. He had no sympathies beyond what touched his egotism, and no resources out of the pale of action and ascendancy. He was a very vain man; for pride (contrary to what the popular fallacy says of the distinction between it and vanity) includes vanity. Pride is so vain a thing, that it dispenses with the ordinary shows of vanity, only out of a more immeasurable self-sufficiency and conceit; and this is the reason why pride is often so mean. You can offend it with your pretensions, by daring to remind it that there is any measure for its own, apart from the standard it has set up; but by no voluntary exercise of its will can it offend itself; because itself is all-sufficient to itself, and reconciles whatsoever of dirty or degrading it admits into the purifying tabernacle of its own glorification.

But Wentworth had his excuses. He was evidently the son of either a very foolish father or foolish mother, perhaps both; and he was brought up in unmeasured notions of the importance of himself and his family. Hence he lorded it over his father, and his brothers and sisters; was at variance with such of them as did not minister to his vanity by obsequiousness; intrigued for ascendancy and obtained it in a county where the local government was singularly corrupt and arbitrary; opposed the court, only to make a better bargain with it; was as mean, and full of thanks almost lachrymose, for the least attentions from the King, as he was insolent to the rest of the world; became a lord, a lord-lieutenant, and a despot; was an upholder of Church and State, and a man of indiscriminate gallantry; an eloquent speaker, yet not content without spoiling his eloquence by arrogance; did good to Ireland in giving it the linen-trade (for he was an excellent financier, and would have made a capital man of business under a better system); did it infinite harm otherwise, in maintaining the pernicious notion that it was to be everlastingly treated as a conquered country; showed an invincible energy in the midst of the most painful illnesses and infirmities; and, finally, by his senseless pride, and a heaping-up of the secret resentments of almost all men, "friends" as well as enemies, brought himself to the block, and has become a lesson to the world of the nonentity of the greatest abilities unaccompanied with a due sense of the importance of one's fellow-creatures.

As to his "apostacy," our author has finally delivered him from the spirit of the charge, but only on the strength of another baseness, and at the expense of the letter of it. He has shown that Wentworth never was with the Parliament at heart; and that he protested, with vehement eloquence, against the arbitrary measures of the court, only to enable himself the better to take his stand for carrying every one of them into effect!

But Mr. Forster has shown him also writing letters from the country about the tranquil enjoyments of a garden, and others to those who had the care of his children, evincing a playful and fatherly tenderness. For these, and for all the other fetchings-out of the human being, both in Strafford's and Eliot's life, thanks and praise be to his biographer. Oh, every man, the most arbitrary as well as the most just, has a human corner in his heart, which circumstances, best for all, and those only, will soften, and increase, and help to colour and ennoble all the rest of it, if not thwarted by such as make him think of himself alone! It is true, the first thing which a selfish man will love, if he love anything besides himself, will be his children, because they are self-reflexions of him, and a sort of continuation of his personal identity. Still, they are not quite himself; they are a step out of the mere personal and identical creature; and by learning an interest in them as human beings, he may learn to sympathize with the 'rest of his fellow-creatures. But it is curious to see, in those fatherly letters of the two men, the different views of good which Strafford and Eliot entertained for their children. Eliot consigns his to the care of Hampden, and talks of nothing but their learning and morals. Strafford commits his to flattering dependents and to great ladies, and confines himself to their clothes, their dancing, their French, and the fine houses and estates he has secured for them.

In what ended all this violence and worldly solicitude? The earldom of Strafford became extinct in the next generation; the estates were carried by females into other families; and Wentworth House, Yorkshire, is now in possession of a popular Whig lord (Fitzwilliam) whose grandfather married a descendant of one of his daughters. The family of the Eliots is still flourishing in the person of the Earl of St. Germains, though, curiously enough, in the Tory interest. But a Tory of these days is not, of necessity, one that would terrify the stately patriotism of Sir John Eliot at having him for a representative; neither, indeed, could the family pride even of Strafford be hurt by seeing himself represented by a Fitzwilliam. But think of what all his most darling projects have come to,-his despotic government, his ruling "without Parliament," his male representation, himself! In nothing did he succeed except in the least selfish part of his affections, his daughters; and in the speculation which was most for the benefit of his fellow-creatures, the Irish linen-trade. All the proud, selfish, violent remainder went into the dust. He had not the comfort of a handsome retrospect, nor a sense of the adherence even of those he had most served. The courtiers, whose pockets he had filled, forsook him; his very master forsook him; no consolation remained for him but the fellow-wretchedness of poor, doating Laud, the pity of private friends, and his love for his children-which last was, as it deserved to be, his best, and latest, and only real stay. On the other hand, Eliot had all the resources of a more tranquil lover of books, of principles to look back upon which he had never gainsaid, of the respect of the most June.-VOL. XLVII. NO. CLXXXVI,

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respected men of his time, and of a cheerful and pious philosophy. Instead of having to complain of being forsaken by a king, he felt himself to be a match for a king by his endurance; and he asserted the "monarchy of man." But, above all, he succeeded in his cause. His spirit may have indeed beheld it flourishing even in a royal shape, accompanied at the same time by the universal desecration of " the enormous faith of many made for one." Strafford, Cromwell, and Charles's sons, impeded this cause for a time; but a new Revolution proclaimed it-it set the House of Brunswick on the throne; has commenced a career of justice, even to Ireland; and though perplexed at this instant in its look towards that quarter, will yet, it is to be hoped, find as quiet a means of uniting all "orders" for its completion, as it will assuredly find some means or other; for the history of the civilized world, since the greater diffusion of knowledge, has rendered this maxim incontrovertible,-that power is strong and ultimately successful, in proportion to its sympathy with the opinion of the majority; and since all decently-educated persons have in some measure become sovereigns, the grand point is how to make the sovereign of them all a true king of kings; which is to be done, not by denying them, as if they were children, anything which they have really set their hearts on, but by treating them like men that have both sense and power, and thus encouraging them to retain the willing childhood of gratified and wise hearts-that noble childhood and sincerest manhood, which will continue to respect a king and his ornaments too, as surely as it does the blue in the sky or the golden processions of the stars, if more officious worshippers will but let it.

DEVEREUX, BY THE AUTHOR OF "PELHAM."

MR. BULWER'S mind is-like all great minds-a progressive one. Every one of his works represents a mental epoch. In " Pelham" we have his impressions; in the "Disowned" his feelings; and in "Devereux" his thoughts. "Pelham" was the satire of a young and clever man thrown early into society, feeling its hollowness with the intuition of talent, and taking refuge in sarcasm, to whose keenness truth gave depth. It was written with that gaiety-the first of all our emotions to abandon us-whose light vanishes from youth even before its bloom. From the first it was singularly misunderstood; for irony, like the language of the ancient oracles, needs to be explained to the many. But "Pelham" has long since taken its place at the head of modern satires on modern life, and the earlier judgments passed on its merits have merged in general admiration. "To use," as Canning says, "a simile of dissimilitude," the cradle of genius is surrounded, like that of Sophocles, by a swarm-not of bees, but of wasps."

"Devereux" united the wit of "Pelham" with the poetry of the "Disowned," but with more of mental analysis than either. The character of the hero is a masterpiece of moral investigation; and herein consists one of the greatest charms of Mr. Bulwer's writings. There are a thousand subtle and shrinking emotions, which

"Men name not to themselves,

And trust not to each other:"