CURRENT LITERATURE.

I. History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Disgrace of Chief-Justice Coke, 1603-1616. By Samuel Rawson Gardiner, late Student of Christ Church. 2 vols. Hurst and Blackett.

THIS is the most important historical work of the quarter. "It is only," says Mr. Gardiner in his preface, "after investigating the circumstances under which certain dominant ideas have arisen, that it becomes possible to enter into the feelings of those who entertained them, and even approximately to draw the line which separates a blunder from a crime. It is for this reason that the first fourteen years of James I. are especially worthy of study. At the end of 1616 the Constitution, at least in the minds of the supporters of the Crown, had assumed that form which was always defended by them, in the course of the ensuing conflict, as the true Constitution of the country. The prerogative had established its claim to be considered as the regulating part of the machinery. The sittings of parliament had been suspended without any immediate prospect of their renewal. The judges had been taught, by a practical example, that they held their offices only at the good pleasure of the sovereign. In short, these thirteen years and a half were years of constitutional change, no less real because it was carried on within the letter of the Constitution. It was in them that the weapons were forged which were to be used by James and his son, with such unfortunate results for themselves."

It will be seen by these words that Mr. Gardiner considers the period he has chosen for his historical studies as the momentous era in which all those arbitrary principles were framed and developed, against which the popular and constitutional party in England were constrained to protest, and eventually have recourse to arms. This is his answer to the assertion of Hume, that in the maintenance of their prerogative the Stuarts never exceeded the Tudors; though the spirit of the nation had changed, yet, judged by the letter of the Constitution, the measures of James I., or at least of Charles I., were no more illegal than those of Henry VIII. or Elizabeth. For those supposed aggressions on the liberties of the subject which led to a civil war, and developed the energies and opposition of Hampden, Pym, Selden, and Elliot, abundant precedent could be found. The difference of the two eras consisted only in this: under Elizabeth all parts of the Constitution equally and progressively developed themselves, and so one part counterbalanced the other; under the Stuarts the royal prerogative had assumed dimensions incompatible with those rights and liberties which had descended to the people undiminished, yet unprogressive, from the last reign. The political monster-births of the seventeenth century were not, according to Mr. Gardiner, a fungus or an excrescence caused by some adventitious matter not natural to the body politic, but an undue development of one organ, which in its overgrowth threatened destruction to the rest, and ultimately to itself. The kingcraft of James, the cunning of Salis

bury, the brilliant genius and profound philosophical abilities of Bacon, all lent their aid to this disastrous object; and like the Cyclops, though of unequal size, they all equally helped to forge those chains by which the liberties of the people should be kept within due bounds, whilst the royal prerogative ranged and roamed at large.

Undoubtedly this theory of Mr. Gardiner's, worked out by great research, by a most honest and conscientious inquiry into the statepapers and correspondence of this reign, will prove very attractive. Unjustifiable as might be the motives and purposes of James and his courtiers, they are redeemed from that insignificance and even meanness thrown over them by popular historians. It sorts better with our

notions of the genius of Bacon, and even the talents and experience of Salisbury, to be told that they were not merely led by the caprices of the moment, or ministering to the idle tastes and pedantic follies of a shambling and irresolute king. There is something in Mr. Gardiner's view to justify the oft-repeated compliment of Bacon, hitherto regarded as gross flattery, when he compares James I. to Henry VII., and indorses the epithet of the Second Solomon. It may not be a grandeur without alloy, but it is a grandeur strangely at variance with the popular conceptions of this reign, to learn that the thoughts and measures of James I., not unlike those of Henry VII., were steadily turned to the purpose of fortifying the monarchy against popular aggressions, and developing the prerogative within the letter, and therefore within the limits, of the Constitution.

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But though we might be tempted to admit such consistency of purpose in the politic mind of Bacon, and of some others, the greatest difficulty against this admission will be found in the character of James himself. Popular belief guided by popular instincts, and still more confirmed in these impressions by the great novelist, will hardly be induced to attribute so profound and consistent a design to James I. it will hardly confound him with his grandson James II. Undoubtedly he was desirous that the House of Commons should be kept in good order; that it should listen, like "beardless boys," to his speeches, and be profoundly impressed by his wisdom and his eloquence. He hated to be bothered; he disliked business. He had come from Scotland with no pleasant reminiscences of Buchanan, Knox, Presbyterianism, and the Gowries. England was the promised land. He had expected to sit down in quietness and enjoy himself at the banquet which the frugality and stern administration of Elizabeth had prepared for him. His notions of the English Constitution, in church and state, were measured by these feelings. He had seen under Elizabeth a submissive parliament and very obedient bishops, a striking contrast to his rougher experience of Scotland, and he anticipated the same. He thought he had found the secret of her plenty, peace, and prosperity; and he formalised the thought, to which all his former suffering at home seemed to bear evidence, by his favourite maxim, "No bishop, no king." Long before his arrival, every statesman of any account had paid him the utmost deference; all parties had sought his favour,Church of England, Puritan, Catholic; Essex and Cecil, Northampton

and Raleigh. On his arrival, Bacon was just ready to welcome him with his Advancement of Learning. "Beholding you not with the inquisitive eye of presumption, to discover that which the eye telleth me is inscrutable, but with the observant eye of duty and admiration, leaving aside the other parts of your virtue and fortune, I have been touched, yea and possessed, with an extreme wonder at those your virtues and faculties which the philosophers call intellectual." With such language, such submissiveness, reflected in every part of England, we can see no reason, even if the character of James encouraged such an hypothesis, for supposing that James had so deep a design as is attributed to him by Mr. Gardiner. It seems to us a much more probable supposition, that he had miscalculated the temper of the people of England; he had expected to find them compliant and submissive. Their long and patient reluctance to oppose his measures he construed into a general admiration of his wisdom and of the moderation of his rule. This is evident from his public behaviour on all occasions. He talked to the House of Commons like a parcel of schoolboys; and to the Puritan divines at the Hampton-Court Conference as if, in his own words, they were truants and deserved the rod. "We have kept such a revel with the Puritans here this two days," he tells one of his correspondents, "as was never heard the like; quhaire I have peppered thaime as soundlie as ye have done the Papists thaire." Such self-complacency is incompatible with a deep-laid design of systematically subverting the constitutional liberties of his subjects,—if, indeed, such a phrase could convey any distinct meaning to Englishmen in the first half of the seventeenth century,-and of developing the prerogative in the way Mr. Gardiner apprehends. That is attributing a degree of caution, consistency, and prudence to James utterly foreign to his habits. Mr. Gardiner has produced instances of arbitrary and unjustifiable acts, on the part of the king and his advisers, which seem to fortify his hypothesis. He can appeal to the opinions of those who have carefully studied the constitutional history of the reign, and, better still, to the evidence afforded by the state correspondence of the time in support of his theory. But such evidence is not sufficient; it can be explained on better grounds than the assumption of a purpose foreign to the temper and inconsistent with the general character of James. That in succeeding to the throne of Elizabeth he should have imagined he more than inherited her authority and her claims on the obedience of her subjects; that he should have visited with severe and arbitrary penalties instances of disobedience to his wishes; that with his own special ignorance, and in the general uncertainty of constitutional rights, he should have overstepped the limits of the prerogative, was natural enough; any opposition seemed to him to exaggerate itself into the crime of disaffection. We admit that the royal prerogative was brought more frequently into play as part of the state machinery under the Stuarts than under the Tudors, but not in the way which Mr. Gardiner apprehends. The Tudors wielded that strongly, and without conscious effort, which James exercised feebly and inconsis tently. They persuaded the people that the royal supremacy was iden

tical with popular liberty and national independence. James, like all weak people, by talking so much of his prerogative, anticipated and provoked opposition.

That Mr. Gardiner has done wisely in rejecting the absurd stories propagated "by the great mass of anecdote-mongers," that he is perfectly right in stigmatising their narratives as thoroughly untrustworthy, no one who has ever been at the pains to examine these subjects will question. "Of all these offenders," he remarks, "Weldon is incomparably the worst. I believe there is not a single instance in which his assertions can be in any way tested, in which they cannot be shown to be, if not downright lies, at least recollections so distorted as to be utterly worthless for the purposes of history." Yet so carelessly has the history of England been written, that Weldon and Wilson and other equally unveracious writers have been the chief, in some instances the only, source from which the popular notions of this reign have been derived, and continued, almost unchallenged and unquestioned, to the present day. Most of the scandalous stories-all the grosser ones— connected with the reign of James I. rest on no better authority. Even the scepticism of Hume, though shocked more than once by the inconsistency and effrontery of these writers, was not sufficient to break through their trammels. He retained their falsehoods probably for no better reason than that he was too indolent to undertake the necessary labour for discovering the truth. English readers are under great obligations to Mr. Gardiner for having done that which all his predecessors neglected to do. He has gone for his information to the fountain head. He has examined every statement by the light of original and contemporary authority. He has at once thrown off the superincumbent mass of idle traditions and unauthenticated anecdotes, and the result is, that he has produced two volumes, on the most important period of this reign, replete with accurate and well-digested information. If the reader do not agree on all occasions with Mr. Gardiner's conclusions, if he feel inclined to dissent from his historical theories, he can have no reason to doubt the accuracy of Mr. Gardiner's facts. Indeed, with a singular and fearless honesty, Mr. Gardiner more than once furnishes reasons in his notes for dissenting from the opinions he has propounded in his text. It appears to us that his views are more advanced than he is perhaps willing himself to acknowledge, or dares trust himself openly to enunciate to his readers. He has seen the baselessness of many favourite notions, of the popular impressions, of the long-established conclusions respecting the most momentous events of the reign. But either he has not dared openly to contradict prejudices fortified by so much authority, or has not succeeded in emancipating himself from the influence of those writers, of whose worthlessness and untrustworthiness he is fully convinced. Does he believe in the patriotism of Salisbury? Was Raleigh the innocent victim he is fondly represented? Was the Gunpowder Plot really intended to blow up the Parliament and reëstablish popery? Was the letter to Monteagle a forgery or not, to crown his own perfidy? Was Overbury poisoned by Rochester, or poisoned at all? Was the

humiliation of the judges the act of James or the officious policy of Bacon? When we consult Mr. Gardiner's text for an explanation he gives us one answer, but he seems to suggest another and more correct one in his notes. In fact, though Mr. Gardiner has done much towards clearing away the popular misconceptions relating to this period of history, more yet remains to be done. His mind is yet in a transition state, lingering half way between the old prejudices of earlier impressions and the new conclusions continually forcing themselves upon his mind by the evidence he has brought to bear on his subject. He cannot stay where he is, and we shall watch with considerable interest his future labours. One or two things we would suggest to him: that he should devote himself to a history of the whole reign, and break through the arbitrary and artificial limits he has imposed upon himself. Let him keep his narrative more together, and reduce his digressions from the main subject, as in chapters i. vii. and ix., to more reasonable dimensions. In a history of James I. there is no need to straggle back to the Norman Conquest or even the Spanish Armada; still less, if he must allude to the condition of Ireland, to begin with the victories of Henry II. This is a tedious impertinence of modern historians which Mr. Gardiner may well afford to avoid, without injury to the completeness of his work, and with much advantage to his readers.

II. Six Months in the Federal States. By Edward Dicey. Macmillan.

Mr. Dicey visited New York, the Empire City, and Washington, the official capital, of the United States, traversed the railways which cross the garden-like country of Kentucky and Tennessee, went northwards by St. Louis, the point of departure for the Western provinces, through the corn-land of Illinois to the emporium of Chicago, and after a voyage on the Mississippi turned eastwards, and completed his travels at Boston. He thus had ample opportunity of contrasting the sentiments and politics of New England, which have had time to become in some degree historical, with those of the Western free-states on the one hand, where material interests are little counteracted by habit and tradition, and with those of the border slave-states on the other, where a dubious loyalty indicates a balance rather than a predominance of motives.

One peculiar charm of all Mr. Dicey's writing is a style of singular grace and simplicity. He has the art of speaking unaffectedly without garrulousness, and of expressing strong opinions in the moderate language of a man of the world. But the higher merits of his present book, which leave it we think unsurpassed by any English travels in America except Mr. Stirling's, are the instinct of an observer who knows what to see and what to pass by, and a thoughtfulness which rises to the level of the highest common sense, though perhaps it never goes beyond it. With much European experience, which often serves him in good stead, Mr. Dicey a little wants the European or cosmopolitan point of view; and having divested himself of English prejudices, writes like a New-Englander of high culture. His strength and his