nature, temporary and provisional, and the same considerations which would induce us to confirm the jurisdiction of the Company in those portions of the chartered territory which are not required for settlement, would justify us in extending its authority over all that part of the continent to which the same reasoning will apply. There is no middle course between competition and monopoly. It is true, indeed, that such an arrangement would be equivalent to an entire reorganisation of the interior of British America; but we do not believe that any less comprehensive measure would meet the necessities of the case. Even if the existing rights of the Hudson's Bay Company were coextensive with the requirements of their trade, if the whole of the Indian territory were included in the Charter of 1670, it would not be prudent to leave their authority without further support. Already the evils of competition are felt, to some extent, in the district lying between the frontier and the Saskatchewan, and we may be sure that they will not be less apparent when that district becomes the seat of a numerous and enterprising population. If the Hudson's Bay Company are to be established in the possession of any part of British America, let us at all events give them a good title. Be the extent of their jurisdiction what it may, it is most desirable that that jurisdiction should, to use the words of Mr. Gladstone, "rest for the future on the basis of statute."

The necessary conditions, therefore, of any satisfactory settlement of this question are two,-the elevation of the habitable portion of the territory to the rank of a colony, and the transfer of the non-habitable portion to the Hudson's Bay Company, with such regulations as to the conduct of their trade and the treatment of the natives as Parliament might think advisable. It would not be necessary, in the first instance, to determine the final limits of the two districts. The River Saskatchewan might be taken as a provisional boundary, with a stipulation that if any part of the country north of that stream shall hereafter prove fit for colonisation, it shall be surrendered by the Company without additional compensation.

Upon the importance of the subject we have been discussing we have no space to dwell. We must leave to the imagination of our readers the task of depicting the magnificent future that may well be in store for a community which will unite British Columbia with Canada, and keep alive the name and the institutions of England across the whole breadth of the New World. But there is one point upon which we must say a word or two before bringing these remarks to a close. We may rest assured that if the southern part of Rupert's Land be really fitted for colonisation, it will not long remain uncolonised. It is not in

The

our power to prevent the change; it is in our power to determine by whom it shall be brought about. We have now, to all appearance, to make our choice between throwing open the territory for settlement, or keeping it in its present state. day may come when we shall see that the alternative really presented to us was, whether to throw it open for settlement, or to let it slip out of our hands altogether. Later and more searching investigation has done much to overthrow the long-established belief of the American public in the boundless fertility of the Far West of the United States. It is now known that the region to the south and west of the great bend of the Missouri, the whole interior of the continent west of the 98th degree of longitude, is a vast rainless desert. The stream of migration from Minnesota, thus dammed up in its natural channel, must eventually find an outlet in a north-westerly direction, towards the prairies of the Saskatchewan. If large bodies of settlers from the United States find themselves the only occupants of a vast and fertile country closely adjoining their own, and separated from its lawful possessors by hundreds of miles of uninhabited wilderness, it is not difficult to foretell the result. They will apply the doctrine of "squatter sovereignty" to the determination of national character and allegiance, and seek in Northern annexation a consolation for Southern secession. In that case we shall probably find it a hard matter to uphold a bare legal right against the triple claim of first settlement, actual possession, and "manifest destiny."

ART. IV.-LORD MACAULAY'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Macaulay's History of England. Vol. V. London: Longman and Co.

Correspondence between the Bishop of Exeter and the Right Hon. T. B. Macaulay. London: Murray.

The New Examen. By John Paget. London and Edinburgh: Blackwood and Son.

THERE is an old story of Falconnet, a vain man, after the wont of artists and Frenchmen, that he was once lecturing a class of students on the horse of Marcus Aurelius. For a time he was critical and captious, pointing out little faults of detail, and contrasting them with a more perfect anatomical model of his own. But at last the spirit of the artist overcame professional jealousy: "Après tout, messieurs, ce vilain cheval vit, et le mien

est mort." Something of the same feeling must cross the mind of every true literary man when he looks on those classical masterpieces of older literature, which he knows to be faulty and imperfect, but which are yet unsurpassable in their way. Without placing Lord Macaulay on a level with Humboldt or Goethe, it is yet impossible not to rank him in the very first class of men who have influenced England and Europe in the last fifty years. Probably no English prose-writer has ever been so generally read on the Continent. His singular clearness and precision, his brilliant rhetoric and antithesis, flow almost as naturally in French as in his native tongue, and one of the greatest faults of his style, its poverty in idiomatic epithets, particularly fits it to be rendered without loss. Yet, with all this, Lord Macaulay carried with him the broadest stamp of British nationality. Educated at the most exclusive school in the country, and in the more specially national of our Universities, he seems never to have lost the traditions of his boyhood, when England was shut out from the Continent, and when foreign thought never passed our custom-houses. He himself in later years must have smiled at the exuberance of his youthful patriotism. The famous passages in which he spoke of it as the mission of France to be "the interpreter between England and mankind," or described the English race as "the hereditary aristocracy of mankind," could scarcely be matched in our sober literature. But they exactly represent the indomitable self-confidence, and contempt for weaker races, which foreigners not quite unjustly ascribe to the English character. It is not wonderful that a writer whose style was transparent, while his mode of thought had the raciness of a special type, should acquire the universal popularity which in general is only achieved by wide sympathies.

The charge of all others most commonly brought against Lord Macaulay has been unfairness. Probably his best excuse would be that which M. Michelet has offered in a splendid passage for himself: "I profess it, this history is not impartial. It does not preserve a wise and prudent balance between good and evil. On the contrary, it is frankly and vigorously partial for the right and the truth." It is almost needless to point out the fallacy of these reasonings, which regard good and evil, in the strife of opinion, as separated by clear boundary-lines, which every honest man is able and bound to recognise. But the error was one which Lord Macaulay's very excellences particularly disposed him to fall into. It is no paradox to say that he was one-sided and partial through his very intellectual thoroughness and moral integrity. Complete up to a certain point as an artist and as a thinker, he had no conception of the intellectual regions that lay without him. He himself was accustomed to

say, "I am no metaphysician ;" and he evidently thanked God that he was not misled by the logical day-dreams that haunt other men. In one remarkable instance he led the way in doing justice to men who had been roughly handled before, the English Puritans. But his appreciation of them was curiously incomplete; and his early evangelical training and Whig sympathies, and the respect of the strong for strength, pretty well make it up. A poet and an orator, he failed to seize those salient points in their character to which Sir Walter Scott and Professor Kingsley were at once led, with inferior knowledge, but with a quicker instinct for the picturesque. This absence of the Shakespearian faculty was even more remarkable in Macaulay when he treated questions of abstract thought. In solid straightforward common sense he had no superiors, and his criticisms of Southey's social theories, and of Mr. Gladstone's Church and State, are unimpeachable in their way. But the reasoner broke down altogether when he had to grapple with questions which could not be measured by plumb and line. His respect for Bacon is a graceful homage to pure intellect; but that such a man should have wasted his faculties on an attempt to perfect the reasoning processes, appeared to his critic a singular illustration of "the idols of the cave.' What was the good of teaching men to think, when we all think naturally, and are strong or feeble in spite of our respective trainings? Yet Lord Macaulay would assuredly not have disdained grammar and rhetoric, although M. Jourdain talked prose without knowing it.

We dwell upon this want at once of grasp and of subtlety, not assuredly from any desire to disparage the reputation of our great historian, but because we believe a true understanding of his failings necessary to clear his character. Writing as a partisan, he provoked discussions of singular warmth and personal interest. The result has certainly been to invalidate his conclusions in several instances. Probably the same method, if applied further, would yield similar results. But the importance of these criticisms must not be exaggerated. They show that as a portraitpainter Lord Macaulay coloured too much in black and white, and neglected intermediate shades, and the softening effects of atmosphere. It makes a great difference whether Penn was for some few weeks in a false position, or consistently base; whether William III.'s morality was that of a high-minded man who despised crime, or that of an able man who commonly preferred righteous measures as the safer and more politic, Still, the change of a few sentences would involve all the concessions that Lord Macaulay's critics could fairly demand. He himself would probably have done justice after his fashion to Penn's greatness as the founder of an American colony, and to Marl

borough's practical integrity when his rival was no longer on the throne. To praise extravagantly in one place, and blame immoderately in another, is not the method of a consummate artist; but neither is it the quality of a dishonest man. It only shows that the writer appreciates his subject in pieces, not as a whole, and describes his heroes from their acts, not from their characters. Meanwhile the solid merits of Lord Macaulay remain unaffected, a vivid style, an unapproachable command of materials, a sterling morality, and a correct though somewhat limited appreciation of events.

Among the critics whom the History of England has provoked, the Bishop of Exeter and Mr. Paget are perhaps those who have chosen their points of attack best. The style of the Bishop's correspondence is not altogether pleasant. His compliments as he opens are a little fulsome, and he plants his strokes with an almost ferocious exultation. But the dialectical value of his arguments is considerable, and makes us regret that a man capable of doing good service to the history of opinion should have frittered away his ability upon worthless diocesan squabbles. In one of the two chief points for which he contends, the Bishop is clearly right. The question is of the relations established between Church and State at the Reformation. Lord Macaulay was probably ignorant of the strong language used by many of the schoolmen in asserting the rights of the temporal power against the Church. He had certainly overlooked the long series of acts by which the English nation for a hundred and fifty years had been depriving the See of Rome of any thing more than a nominal suzerainty. Coming to the Reformation with the ordinary Protestant view, that it was a volcanic outburst of hidden forces, he was struck with the contrast between Cranmer's language on the rights of a Christian king and the doctrines now in vogue at the Vatican. He regarded the primate as a time-server, ready to sacrifice every thing to power, and to acknowledge Henry VIII. as the source even of the sacraments. In thinking and stating this he was no doubt thoroughly wrong. The one real evidence for his opinion, an answer of Cranmer's to the question by what authority bishops were appointed, is contradicted, as the Bishop of Exeter observes, by the opinion of every other divine consulted, and by Cranmer's own views at other periods. We believe, indeed, the Bishop has conceded too much in allowing that Cranmer even on that occasion intended to admit that the priestly powers were in themselves derived from the State. His words are a little incautious, but they do not exclude the view taken by his colleagues, that they were a grace, so to speak, given by God. In fact, the question at issue was not as to the exclusive right