Historical Characters: Mackintosh, Talleyrand, Canning, Cobbett, Peel

by Baron Henry Lytton Bulwer Dalling and Bulwer

The condition of Europe, also, just prior to the wars of the Roses, is rapidly, picturesquely, and comprehensively sketched.

“The historian who rests for a little space between the termination of the Plantagenet wars in France and the commencement of the civil wars of the two branches of that family in England, may naturally look around him, reviewing some of the more important events which had passed, and casting his eye onward to the preparations for the mighty changes which were to produce an influence on the character and lot of the human race. A very few particulars only can be selected as specimens from so vast a mass. The foundations of the political system of the European commonwealth were now laid. A glance over the map of Europe, in 1453, will satisfy an observer that the territories of different nations were then fast approaching to the shape and extent which they retain at this day. The English islanders had only one town of the continent remaining in their hands. The Mahometans of Spain were on the eve of being reduced under the Christian authority. Italy had, indeed, lost her liberty, but had yet escaped the ignominy of a foreign yoke. Moscovy was emerging from the long domination of the Tartars. Venice, Hungary, and Poland, three states now placed under foreign masters, guarded the eastern frontier of Christendom against the Ottoman barbarians, whom the absence of foresight, of mutual confidence, and a disregard of general safety and honour, disgraceful to the western governments, had just suffered to master Constantinople and to subjugate the eastern Christians. France had consolidated the greater part of her central and commanding territories. In the transfer of the Netherlands to the house of Austria originated the French jealousy of that power, then rising in South-Eastern Germany. The empire was daily becoming a looser confederacy under a nominal ruler, whose small remains of authority every day continued to lessen. The internal or constitutional history of the European nations threatened, in almost every continental country, the fatal establishment of an absolute monarchy, from which the free and generous spirit of the northern barbarians did not protect their degenerate posterity. In the Netherlands an ancient gentry, and burghers, enriched by traffic, held their still limited princes in check. In Switzerland, the patricians of a few towns, together with the gallant peasantry of the Alpine valleys, escaped a master. But Parliaments and Diets, States-General and Cortes, were gradually disappearing from view, or reduced from august assemblies to insignificant formalities, and Europe seemed on the eve of exhibiting nothing to the disgusted eye but the dead uniformity of imbecile despotism, dissolute courts, and cruelly oppressed nations.

“In the meantime the unobserved advancement and diffusion of knowledge were preparing the way for discoveries, of which the high result will be contemplated only by unborn ages. The mariner’s compass had conducted the Portuguese to distant points on the coast of Africa, and was about to lead them through the unploughed ocean to the famous regions of the East. Civilized men, hitherto cooped up on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, now visited the whole of their subject planet and became its undisputed sovereigns. The great adventurer[97] was then born, who, with two undecked boats and one frail sloop, containing with difficulty a hundred and twenty persons, dared to stretch across an untraversed ocean, which had hitherto bounded the imaginations as well as the enterprises of men; and who, instead of that India renowned in legend and in story, of which he was in quest, laid open a new world which, under the hands of the European race, was one day to produce governments, laws, manners, modes of civilization and states of society almost as different as its native plants and animals from those of ancient Europe.

“Who could then—who can even now—foresee all the prodigious effects of these discoveries on the fortunes of mankind?”

IV.

No one will deny that what I have just quoted might have been written by a great historian; yet no one will say that the work I quote from is a great history.

It is a series of parts, some excellent, some indifferent, but which altogether do not form a whole. The fragment of the Revolution, though a fragment, presents the same qualities and defects. The narrative is poor; some of the characters, such as those of Rochester, Sunderland, and Halifax—and some of the passages (that with which the work opens, for instance)—are excellent; but then, these fine figures of gold embroidery are worked here and there with care and toil, on an ordinary sort of canvas.

The “Life of Sir Thomas More” is the only complete performance; and this because it was a portrait which might have been taken at one sitting.

The “Treatise on Ethics,” first published in the supplement of the seventh edition of the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” and which has since appeared in a separate form under the auspices of Professor Whewell, is still more remarkable, both in its design and execution, as characterising the author. He seems here, indeed, to have been aware of his own capabilities, and to have accommodated his labours to them; for his work is conceived in separate and distinct portions, and he undertakes to write the course and progress of philosophy by descriptions of its most illustrious masters and professors; a plan gracefully imagined, as diffusing the charm of personal narrative over dry and speculative disquisition.

Nothing, accordingly, can be better executed than some of these pictures. It would be difficult to paint Hobbes, Leibnitz, Shaftesbury, more faithfully, or in more suitable colours; the contrast between the haughty Bossuet and the gentle Fénelon is perfectly sustained; while Berkeley the virtuous, the benevolent, the imaginative, is drawn with a pencil which would even have satisfied the admiration of his contemporaries: