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But it was assuredly inherited sympathy quite as much as critical power that made him lead the way in doing justice to the English Puritans. They had been the mark at which every fool shot his bolt, till Macaulay, before he was thirty, divined and expressed their heroic grandeur in that splendid ode on Naseby, that will live as long as our language. Something more than mere literary taste animated his praise of Milton and Bunyan. Where the memory was so vast, it would prove nothing to point to the knowledge of Scripture which Lord Macaulay constantly displayed. But there is less questionable proof. private conversation, the Bible and the Classics were the sources from which his examples were drawn oftenest. Quite unaffected by modern philosophy, or the cant of spiritualism, he never quoted without reverence; and occasionally, if he was hurried away by argument, astonished his hearer by the simple faith with which he spoke. It is not altogether creditable to his speculative originality that, living in the times of Coleridge and Carlyle, not to say of Hegel and Comte, he should not exhibit a trace of even knowing them in his writings. But whether ignorance or disregard was the motive, one who wandered so little from the beaten path may surely be spared the charge of wantonly assailing his father's faith.

It is not very difficult to see the qualities which attracted Lord Macaulay in William III., or those opposite defects in Penn which repelled him. The pleasure of giving the Whigs an heroic ancestor no doubt entered for something into the historian's estimate; but, above all, he would sympathise with the quiet strength of a silent undemonstrative man, and he felt a certain repulsion, a bourgeois feeling of distrust, for the courtierlike graces which charmed their contemporaries in Churchill and Penn. Of the two faults, it is certainly the less to have admired a hard unamiable man for his heroic strength of purpose and self-command, than to have lost all sight of a hero's greatness in disgust at his faults of manner. It is curious to reflect that a Protestant and constitutional people have been more lenient to the memory of Charles II. than to that of the Prince of Orange, and that the single massacre of Glencoe should have left a deeper stain than the persistent persecution of the Cameronians. The king, who was English born, and fed his dogs in the Mall, might outrage decency and humanity with impunity; but the one great crime of the Dutchman, who drank hollands and disliked mixed society, has been written in letters of brass. The reprobation is not undeserved. The particular crime on which it has lighted would be viewed leniently in any country but England. Suchet and Victor committed military massacres of far deeper dye in the Peninsula. A few years later

than the affair of Glencoe, order was enforced in the Cevennes by means compared with which the extirpation of a single clan is merciful. But as native of Holland and king of England, William ought to have had a deeper feeling for law, if not for mercy. Unhappily his absorbing passion, the love of power, made him little scrupulous about means. At a critical moment of his country's history, he had connived at, if he had not concerted, the murder of the De Witts. What he did to remove rivals he would naturally consent to in order to extirpate enemies. The question as to the actual civilisation of the Highlands may be dismissed for a moment. There can be little doubt that William, rightly or wrongly, regarded the clans as savage. That halo of romance which has been thrown around them since 1745 did not then exist: they were known of in England, through the report of Lowlanders, as the despised and hated of a people whom English arrogance in turn hated and despised. The influences of Stair and Breadalbane favoured these misapprehensions for private purposes. In the case of Ireland, which he had visited, William was larger-minded and more liberal than his people and parliament. In the case of the Highlands, which he only knew by report, he was swayed by the lowest prejudices of the worst men. It is possible, as Lord Macaulay says, that his assent to the massacre was given without reflection, though it can hardly have been given ignorantly. But the whole horror of the charge against him is really summed up in this, that he treated the lives of men and women as a question of official routine, and signed them away in the belief that he was technically justified, but on no higher ground than political expediency. His conduct afterwards showed, as Mr. Paget remarks, that he was displeased with the barbarous circumstances which attended the execution of his warrant, but felt no remorse or regret for the orders given.

Yet when all deductions have been made from Lord Macaulay's estimate of his hero, a large debt of gratitude will still be due to the eloquent special-pleader who has rescued us from the charge of national ingratitude. He has not materially modified the verdict commonly passed on the more salient features of the king's character. William's austere common sense and pertinacity are a type which it is not easy to confound with genius; and his bad generalship is as clearly written in his campaigns as his unscrupulous ambition in his political life. But even those who admitted his merits had perhaps failed to see how signally these made up the man and his success. Perpetually beaten, and always keeping the field, more terrible than before; harassed by an unprincipled opposition, and yet wielding a constitutional supremacy over two constitutional states, in one of which he was

a foreigner; tolerant to men whose religious faith was a principle of war and rebellion-William devoted his ambition to the noblest of causes, and won the grandest wreath "ob servatam patriam." The political instinct which made him the champion of European liberty was not the less a virtue because in the end it placed two monarchies at his feet. It remained to show that the man had human feeling, and was not an egoism or an idea petrified. Lord Macaulay has happily brought the softer parts of his nature into the light. It is something to know that William was not all brain; that his sullen reserve covered a strong feeling for his devoted wife, and almost passionate sentiments of friendship for Bentinck and Albemarle.

In one or two instances that concern the part taken by Claverhouse in the murder of Brown the Christian carrier, and Penn's complicity in exacting fines from the sufferers in the Monmouth rebellion, the question becomes purely one of historical criticism. In the first instance, we agree with Mr. Paget that Lord Macaulay followed the less accurate account, and in the second that he has confounded two distinct personages. In both cases it is evident that the less favourable account was preferred by the historian because he took a dark view of the men whose actions he related. But Mr. Paget falls, curiously enough, into the very error he deprecates. He quotes a rhetorical passage from Bancroft's History of the United States on the virtues of William Penn; and throughout his essay tacitly assumes that the warm eulogy of an admirer was justified not merely by the general tenor of Penn's life, but by his every action. We disbelieve in this absolute perfection of any hero, and are not inclined to regard Penn as above the level of humanity. The weak points of his amiable injudicious character were assuredly courtliness, and a certain want of scrupulosity in compassing good ends. At a time when the Anglican divines showed themselves nobly superior to their old doctrine of passive obedience, and when nine out of ten Dissenters refused to purchase religious liberty at the price of the constitution, Penn was the one man of eminence in the religious world who used his credit on the side of the court. It is true that in his address he expressed a hope that the king's illegal proclamation would be ratified by the concurrence of the Parliament. James himself might with perfect honesty have uttered the same wish; the thing nearest his heart at the time was, not to establish arbitrary power, but to open the way for Catholicism. Surely it is mere sophistry to see in such an expression a virtual remonstrance with the king; and the fact that Penn had pri

*This, as Mr. Paget observes, is now pretty much matter of certainty, since the publication of Claverhouse's despatch in Mr. Napier's Memoirs of Dundee.

vately warned his master against such a stretch of power is only another reason why he should not have allowed the world to think he acquiesced in it. The fact is, Penn's manners, as Lord Macaulay well puts it afterwards, had been "corrupted. by evil communication." Again, the main substance of another charge, that he tried to bribe Hough by the offer of a bishopric to desert the cause of Magdalen College and Protestantism, seems to us established beyond doubt by the very passages Mr. Paget quotes. We quote the decisive sentences in extenso; and as they come from a letter by Dr. Hough, the testimony may be regarded as decisive. It is probable he disliked Penn, but he does not press the charge as a man who thought it important or had invented it.

"I thank God he did not so much as offer at any proposal by way of accommodation, which was the thing I most dreaded. Only once, upon the mention of the Bishop of Oxford's indisposition, he said, smiling, If the Bishop of Oxford die, Dr. Hough may be made bishop. What think you of that, gentlemen ? Mr. Craddock answered, they should be heartily glad of it; for it would do very well with the presi dentship. But I told him seriously I had no ambition above the post in which I was," &c.

In this passage the second clause of the first sentence either contradicts or completes the one preceding it. It is surely reasonable to suppose that it completes it, and that Hough meant to say that Penn had only hinted at one kind of compromise. In fact, the offer was one which could scarcely be made definitely in a public conference. Penn seems to have thought, as a Dissenter not unreasonably might, that the strict exclusiveness of the University might be broken down with advantage to the nation. Having seen the worst side of the English Church, he probably regarded the firmness of the college fellows as a mere struggle to retain a benefice in their hands. He did not understand the peculiar conscientiousness by which a generation of clergymen, who had acquiesced in the tyranny and disorders of Charles II., were prepared to sacrifice property and life sooner than betray the outworks of their Church. All this explains, but it cannot be said to excuse the conduct of the Quaker patriarch. In the interests of religious liberty and tranquillity, he was prepared to make himself the agent in the sale of a bishopric by the king in exchange for the inalienable rights of a corporation. Surely Penn's principles, and his life when the temptations of a court were withdrawn, were framed on a very different standard from that by which he guided himself on this occasion.

The last point we care to enter into in Mr. Paget's valuable

essays is the difficult question of Highland civilisation. It is the least satisfactory part of his labours, and his remarks are apparently coloured by strong personal feeling. For instance, Lord Macaulay quotes from a humorous letter in doggerel verse, by Colonel Cleland, to prove that in the seventeenth century the Highlanders occasionally smeared themselves with tar. Cleland mentions that this was done to protect the bare legs and neck from the weather; and Lord Macaulay refers to it only as a thing that might be witnessed. The evidence is surely enough for a fact which is not in itself incredible. Cleland, it is true, wrote in jest, and regarded his enemies as barbarians; but even jests have commonly a substructure of reality. At any rate, it is scarcely fair to compare evidence of this sort with the doggerel which children sing in nurseries; a satire at least speaks, however loosely, of certain facts, people, places, and dates. Mr. Paget proceeds to examine the inferences drawn from Burt's letters; and these, it must be borne in mind, were Lord Macaulay's chief authority. It may readily be admitted that Burt was a cockney, who exaggerated little inconveniences, and, like others of his time, was unable to appreciate natural scenery. But he was a singularly fair man; and in some instances, such as his description of Edinburgh,-it is admitted by his Scotch editor that he did more than justice to his subject. Now the general tenor of Burt's description not only bears out Lord Macaulay's version, but goes beyond it. The English officer repeatedly apologises for the terms of disgust which the filthy habits of the natives force from him. It is unnecessary to dwell upon stories which, as Burt himself says, "are not fit to be told to any one that has not an immovable stomach.” Speaking generally, it is impossible for any one carefully to read through the Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland without arriving at the conviction that the Highlands in the last century were rather below the north of Turkey as it now is in civilisation. Except the command of claret, with which a timehonoured French alliance had familiarised the natives, there is no redeeming feature in Burt's narrative. It is true that he did justice to the native dignity and courtesy of the chiefs. Living as he did in the neighbourhood of Lord Lovat and Duncan Forbes, he had singularly good opportunities for seeing the best of the people. But almost all he says might apply, with a little change of locality, to Pawnee or Huron chiefs. In ferocious pride, unbridled passion, disregard of law, morality, and decency, the Highland gentlemen of that day were certainly below the gentry of any nation west of the Vistula, unless Ireland can dispute the palm. Until the rebellion of '45, black-mail was paid for the safety of property. Slavery existed among the