III. THE TERRITORIAL EXPANSION OF RUSSIA,. Fortnightly Review, "STRATHMORE." By one of the Survivors, Chambers' Journal, V. WHEWELL'S WRITINGS AND COrrespond- VI. THE TURKISH ATROCITIES, Nature, Pall Mall Budget, Leisure Hour, 642 Two SEASONS, 643 656 677 696 PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. AUTUMN IN THE WOODS. How changed the scene from that I lately sang, Down to the deepest solitudes, But now the furious wind's sonorous bass And in the air float melodies, which chase And gambol as in ecstasies; Each tree a harp, and every branch a string, And with great heaven's own minstrelsy Some tremulous leaves still hang upon the Quivering 'twixt life and death, And yonder willow sways and sighs and bows, And the last leaf falls flickering to its tomb,- most core By the wild concert of celestial sounds This is God's minster-choir, By the blue heavens o'erspanned; Judge not! Beyond the grave We shall know better the immense, great trial; This man submits, a slave ; The other fights, and dies, in fierce denial. But He who views the strife, Calm from without, more wise than those within it, And now the song bursts forth from harp and Counts the long "Yes" of life, lyre, A hallelujah chorus loud, A hurricane of praise which sweeps Triumphantly from cloud to cloud, As though the very heavens were bowed, And then in silence sleeps. Sweet silence! like the cadence of a psalm: calm Not the one "No," the single faithless minute. TWO SEASONS. Spectator. CAN this be spring? These tearful lights that break Across wet uplands in the windy dawn Wild blasts are sweeping o'er the garden beds, And early flowers, rain-beaten, hang their Can it be spring that wears this stormy guise? Can this be autumn? Freshly green and fair We wait in peace the calm destroyer's feet. From The Contemporary Review. PART II. AFTER HIS FIRST EXILE. IN the summer of 1645 the military affairs of Charles went swiftly to wreck, and Sir Edward Hyde and the Lords Capel and Hopton were told off to form a council for the Prince of Wales. They fell back with the prince into the west of England, and were soon forced to leave the mainland. They first set foot on St. Mary, one of the Scilly Isles, and after a pause of a few weeks proceeded to Jersey, where the little court was broken up. Prince Charles, yielding to the commands of his mother, joined her in Paris. Hyde, with Capel and Hopton, remained in the island. menced a narrative of the events in which he had been engaged, and during the two years of his abode in Jersey he completed that part of the work which describes the beginning of the troubles, the rupture between king and Parliament, and the defeat of the Episcopalian royalists. This is by far the most important part of the whole, for in it he pronounces upon the conduct of the two great parties at the moment when the civil war broke out. The nature of his decision is well known. It is expressed in his title, "The Great Rebellion." In these words he takes for granted exactly what he had to prove. The Parliamentary majority who engaged in war with Charles would have committed to the Tower on a charge of high treason any man who had dared to apply to them the word "rebels." Pym and Hampden made no appeal to the right of insurrection, claimed no license to break with the historic past of England. They professed to aim with all simplicity at perpetuating, under the conditions imposed by the age, the ancient liberties of their country. Their contention, logically stated, was not that they rebelled justly, but that they did not rebel at all; and it was this plea which Clarendon, by the very name on his titlepage, puts out of sight. Herr von Ranke delivers the following opinion on Clarendon : The effect which an historical work can His situation was well fitted to depress or break the strongest spirit. In the prime of manhood, he saw his ambition thwarted, his professional prospects blighted, his patrimony in the hands of his enemies. Now, however, it was that his best qualities shone out. He did not sink into the angry egotistic brooding of disappointed vanity, or seek relief in vociferous execration. In patience he possessed his soul. Qui bene latuit bene vixit, he inscribed on his house in Jersey, and proved that, if he fell short in those kingly and conquering qualities indispensable for success in enterprises of great pith and mo- have is, perhaps, nowhere seen more strongly ment, he was richly endowed with the vir- than in the "History of the Rebellion." The tues that light a man's face in the shade. view of the event in England itself and in the Like all the noble Cavaliers, he was de- educated world generally, has been detervoutly religious, and his Church had never mined by the book. The best authors have been so dear to him as when her pro- repeated it, and even those who combat it do scribed services were his solace in exile. not get beyond the point of view given by He began a commentary on the Psalms. him; they refute him in details, but leave his He walked daily on the sands of the bay views in the main unshaken. Clarendon bewith his friends, Capel and Hopton, expe-longs to those who have essentially fixed the circle of ideas for the English nation. riencing, we may presume, that soothing influence which "Sophocles long ago," It is true that in Clarendon's book there and Homer before him, and Mr. Matthew dwells, as it were incarnate, that subtle Arnold after him, have attributed to the and potent persuasiveness which lured melancholy music of the sea. Falkland to his doom and sealed the ruin of thousands of gallant and honest gentlemen. His history may be defined as the grand mistake of his life stated in lan. guage; and if neither he nor the multitude he misled penetrated that mistake at the But his main resource was the composition of that historical work, in which he, being dead, still speaks to all civilized men. The month in which he landed in the Scilly Isles had not closed before he com 644 When he sat down in Jersey to begin his history, irritated, disappointed, afflicted at all that had passed in the last five years, he could not bring his mind back to the state in which it had been at the meeting of the Long Parliament. time it was made, it was perhaps to be ex- | wrong, can be refuted only by reference pected that several generations should fail to other authorities; Clarendon can be to discern its character when set forth on answered out of his own lips. Hallam the printed page. But it is not true that comments thus on Clarendon's untrust"the best authors" have repeated Claren- worthiness: don, or have not got beyond his point of view, or have refuted him only in details. The best authors who have written on the Puritan Revolution - Hallam, Brodie, Forster, Macaulay,* Carlyle, Masson, Sanford, Bruce, Goldwin Smith, Green, and others take an irreconcilably different view of the whole affair from that of Clarendon. Herr von Ranke states with nice precision the reverse of the fact, when he says that they refute him in details, but leave his general scheme unshaken; for they accept from him not a few matters of detail as authentic and important, but demonstrate his theory and conception of the business to be egregiously wrong. What I have described as the grand mistake of his life was vindicated by himself in a series of plausible and well-worded documents, which delighted Charles and had a profound effect upon simple-hearted, simple-minded Cavaliers; but men of strength and insight on both sides even then saw through them. The surfacelogic and rhetorical varnish of those manifestoes have been reproduced in his history; but consummately able men, thorough in research, sharp and sure in judgment -men in several instances of great genius have rubbed off the paint and displayed the canvas. No hand will ever lay that paint again. This is Clarendon's apology; but it de- Take, for example, that celebrated passage, perhaps the most signal illustration, in historical literature, of mock-heroic In his powerful book on the Great Re- eloquence and elegiac bathos, in which he monstrance, Mr. Forster argues that describes the England of Laud's and Clarendon deliberately falsified the record Strafford's ascendency as basking in the of those transactions in which he took sunshine of peace and joy, and suggests part in 1641 and 1642, and Mr. Brodie that some mysterious infatuation, like has been equally explicit in his charge of what might fall on a nation doomed of untruth. While not daring to maintain heaven, could alone account for the rising against such accusers the perfect good up of the English people against their faith of Clarendon, I believe that he was, saintly monarch. They had, he says, only on the whole, consciously honest. What one grievance! it was a case of losing is unique in his case is the value of his paradise for an apple. And then he arithfacts, as contrasted with, nay, as demon-metically proves that the grievances were strating, the inconsequence of his reason- three: for he tells us that money was ings. Other historians, when they go wrung out of the people by court favorites to an amount out of all proportion to that down by Hallam and Macaulay."-"Lord Carlisle's granted by Parliament, or paid into the Journal," quoted in Macaulay's Biography. treasury; he admits that the king's policy "Mahon tried to defend Clarendon, but was put probably, even at this date, answer in the negative. Dark as is the roll of griev ances enumerated in the Remonstrance, they had, for the most part, been redressed. Could Charles be trusted? Was the attempted arrest of the five members a mere passing caprice? Were law and liberty safe under the guardianship of an admonished and repentant monarch? Clarendon maintains the affirmative; but it is literally true that the green turf of his theory is here again honeycombed by his own averments of fact. One sufficient proof is as good as a thousand; and I submit that the heartfelt detestation with which Charles regarded what had been done in the first session of the Long Parliament, and his definite intention to effect a counter-revolution, are absolutely demonstrated by Clarendon's own account of his private interview with the king and queen before the accusation of the mem was a "total declinature of Parliament; " | the men who carried the Grand Remonand the one grievance which, at the mo- strance did well and wisely? Some will ment when he penned his threnody, he had in view, was the subjection of the law to regal power. Even if we confine our view to his one grievance, must we not pronounce it feeble and foolish to lay stress upon its being numerically one? To speak of the infatuation of a people, agriculturally and commercially prosperous, in sacrificing tranquillity rather than permit the law to be trampled down by the king, is like expostulating with a man whose habit of body is full, and whose complexion is ruddy, because he concerns himself about unquestionable disease of the heart. Clarendon knew and praised Jonson, but I have seen no proof that he ever read Shakespeare, or studied the character of Mercutio. Had he done so, it might have struck him that, as a wound need not be so wide as a church door, or so deep as a well, to let out a man's life, so a nation may have the vital spark of its freedom extinguished though its popula-bers. My conviction that Clarendon did tion is not wasted by famine, nor its cities given up to fire and sword. And is it not a strangely ignoble conception of what ought to rouse a nation to resistance against tyranny, which implies that revolution is folly except in the presence of gross material injuries? How far worthier is the satisfaction which May, the historian of the Long Parliament, expresses in the power of even his lowlier | countrymen to discern and appreciate the bitterness of the calamity that had come upon England, in the violation of her laws and the suppression of her Parliaments! If there is one thing in the history of their country of which Englishmen may be proud, it is that England in those years refused to live by bread alone. The evidence derivable from Clarendon's own narrative, that the golden age of his exordium was a picture of the brain, becomes overpowering when we find that he acted with Hampden and his party in the first session of the Long Parliament. He gives with pomp of approbation a list of those measures by which the policy of Strafford and Laud was condemned, its instruments broken, its ministers punished. Can we prove also, from Clarendon, that not consciously fabricate or suppress is based largely upon his description of that interview. A mere special pleader, determined to bring out but one side of the case, would have buried the incident in the deepest cavern of his memory; and I am not aware that, if Clarendon had not reported it, we should have known anything about it, for Henrietta Maria, singularly enough, completely passes it over in her narrative to Madame de Motteville. But Clarendon does not suppress the fact though it grinds his own reasonings to powder. Clarendon the chronicler annihilates the pleas of Clarendon the advocate; Clarendon the personal attendant of the vacillating yet self-willed, the weak yet tyrannical, the tortuous, ever-plotting, slippery Charles, enables us to put together a portrait of the royal Stuart as different as possible from that which Clarendon the historian paints for us, and labels royal martyr. He calls the noble and deepthoughted men who were engaged in working out the constitutional liberties of England miscreants and rebels for not staking their own lives and the freedom of their country on the faith of a king who, from first to last, deceived Clarendon him |