poor Caleb Balderstone's tin flagon. And yet when all is done there is a hardness and thinness visible to every spectator, and a pity is inspired by the palpably meagre effect of all the sedulous efforts to accomplish by diligence and cunning what wealth alone can realise.

Such being the doom of historical poverty to those who grope into the "dark and fabulous," if it be in their destinies to reach such a period as Britain in the first fifteen years of the eighteenth century, they are to be congratulated as those who have emerged from poverty to the sudden acquisition of great riches. So great is the affluence of this historical reign, that it gives to all comers with an open hand. There is no occasion for jostling-each workman may separately reap a plentiful harvest. There is room and opportunity for the stately historic march of a Gibbon or a Macaulay. But there is abundant material, also, for the accomplished minute criticism and exposition of a Benjamin Disraeli or a Thackeray. Hence many historians have handled the period in many and various ways, so that there is no occasion for those invidious comparisons that cannot be helped when one author does over again the work that has been done by another, or undertakes that which some master-hand has not lived to finish. There are many thoroughly meritorious histories of Queen Anne's reign, and the latest· Lord Stanhope's is the best of all. It has features and merits that separate it as completely from the others, as if it dealt with regions on the opposite side of the globe. While theirs is either the lamp - odoured work of the recluse or the passionate outcry of the political gladiator of the age, his is the estimate of a statesman and patrician of our own days, who, practised in State affairs and the ways of the Court, can with

an easy grace take the estimate of like affairs passing in another age.

Setting down Lord Stanhope's book, and taking up another of a different order of merit-Alison's 'Life of Marlborough'-we have a consciousness of the breadth and fertility of this historical field. The historian of the great war of later times was tempted away from his own chosen ground by what had ever a fascination for him—the career of a great man doing great deeds; and he followed up this career in the brilliant flowing style that came so naturally to his pen, and harmonised so well with the mighty and stirring stories he loved to tell.

It is true that in the Court itself the materials that make the great picturesque epochs of our history do not come up, or rather do not appear, in their usual garb and decorations. We have not, as in Mary Tudor, a grim she-bigot unconsciously feeding the flames of fanaticism to the perpetration of cruelties and slaughters that carry terror and depression over the whole land. Nor have we one like her sister, with wayward strength of will, in her wild caprices torturing wise statesmen, and driving them to their wits' end, till they are made her accomplices in the death of that rival whose career she followed with hatred and envyings, broken in upon by lurid glances of no less fatal sympathy with her struggles as a royal sister. Nor is Queen Anne in any way like to that royal sister her ancestress; nor can we even imagine the good queen, under any possible conditions, affording us a like romance of passion, turbulence, and crime.

But we have in that period a thoroughly picturesque self-made queen in Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough. Behold her as she blooms in the canvas of Kneller. After the hard features of warriors

and statesmen - after even the worldly and anxious features of Court beauties-here is simple nature at last, as if we had alighted on it at a cottage-door-a veritable Phoebe Mayflower, with nature's bloom upon her cheeks, beautiful in her simplicity. It cannot but cross the gazer's thoughts to ask if this can be she who ruled a sovereign with an iron will, until her despotism, becoming intolerable to its good-natured victim, was at last cast off with a revulsion that shook Europe through and through. Here is the face of the only living being that could affect with fear the heart of the great conquering duke. In him it was the fear that should rather be called timidity-the timidity of a deep affection that is ever apprehending possibilities of change or calamity. But on others she cast real practical terror in her power and its vindictive use; and when material power had passed away, in the poisoned shafts of a piercing and envenomed wit. Again, can this be old Sarah, who, alone in her grandeur and wealth, greedy and grasping, adding field unto field, burying herself in bonds, bills, and debentures, could cast a scornful gift of ten thousand pounds at the Boanerges of St Stephen's, to encourage him in his fierce philippics against her great political foe? Remembering all these things, a change seems to have swept over those lines of innocence and beauty. It is somewhat as in the old romances, when insensibly the angel form resolves itself into the demon's. Under the blooming cheeks, and rosy lips, and full lively eyes, we seem to trace the latent lines of hardness and fierceness that strengthened themselves into the character of the great Sarah.

And then how grand is the historical figure that comes forth to us in her husband, the Conquering

Duke! In no one else-not even in George Washington-have we so grand a combination of the most valuable qualities in the man of action,-the heroic soldier, the consummate tactician, the imperturbable and sagacious diplomatist, the wise, firm, and liberal home statesman. In no great commander do we find so much of duty and so little of self. His career is a great lesson, wherein statesmen should learn how to suppress that diseased element in every public service that looks to the claims of the man rather than those of the country. It is in military office, where it is the most dangerous, that this diseased source of action is the rifest. Over and over again has the claims of this man or that man to promotion or command weighed against the risk of a defeated project and the loss of many human lives. There was none of this in Marlborough. He took ever the place assigned to him. When Dutch deputies were selfish and unreasonable, and he might put them to shame or paralyse them by some great blow dealt against their consent, he would not peril the common cause to enhance the lustre of his own military renown. He gave way with graceful alacrity to all humours and ambitions and interests, without a thought for himself, if it seemed conducive ultimately to the success of the great interests at stake that he should give way. There is a pleasant Castor-and-Pollux conception about his co-operation with Prince Eugene-two men, each an independent commander-in-chief, yet both working together through a long succession of great warlike operations in perfect harmony, without a single interruption. No doubt Eugene was a great man among commanders generally; but he was far below the level of his colleague. It suited his great companion's policy, however, that they should

be counted in all things as equals. One less endowed with a high sense of duty would have either bowed the young prince down to his place as a subordinate, or would have driven him from his command, to be replaced by some tried soldier of lower birth who would fall naturally into his place. But Marlborough accepted him in the high place due, if he could hold it, to his birth and nationality, and trained and helped him to the performance of brilliant achievements.

Marlborough had an abundant store of the minor social virtues. He was humane, not only in the negative sense of abstinence from infliction, but in the positive sense of investing labour and thought and self-sacrifice in the prevention or mitigation of human suffering. He was socially tolerant and polite abroad, and an affectionate husband and father at home. He was peaceful and unfactious as a public citizen. He bore without a murmur the sudden check upon his grand career. He had his step firmly placed on French soil, and inevitably he would have marched onwards and dictated to Louis the Grand in Paris. What history would have been had the events of 1815 and 1870 been thus forestalled we can but guess; but it is a great thing, in taking the incidents that enable us to take the measure of a man's character and capacity, to know how nearly it had been done, and how benignly the great hero obeyed the order to halt and return.

And yet we find all this grandeur and beauty of character stained with foul reproaches-reproaches of falsehood, of treachery, and of greed developing itself in absolute acts of peculation. Surely no human character that ever crossed the stage of life has stronger claim for full and close examination, both of its virtues and its defects. There

never was a stronger claim on the renowned maxim-"Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice." For any of the allowances and palliations conceded to the weaknesses of genius there is no room here. The strong commanding nature of Marlborough's practical genius neither invites nor deserves palliation. His strength did not run in the wild wayward currents that drifted natures like that of Charles XII. or of Nelson to success or ruin.

But if the examination of such a character should be rigid and remorseless, it should be made in measurements according to the dimension of the character. The servant in plush should be honest and faithful, and so should the right honourable servant of the Crown, who works as a Cabinet Minister; but we measure the honesty and fidelity of the two with separate scales. For Marlborough, we require to take a rule of measurement far beyond that of even an ordinary Minister of the Crown. He was one of the great powers of Europe, guided by the influences rather of a sovereign than of a sovereign's servant. It was an age when high command was almost exclusively the prerogative of royal persons. The organisation of armies was adjusted so as jealously to exclude from the command of large forces men whe had not been trained to the accomplishment of command, as apart from the mere routine of field duty. But, among the fighting German States, it was only the members of royal houses that had the opportunity of imbibing this high class of military education. Yet here was the son of an English gentleman stepping into supreme command over all of them with the easy grace of one born in the purple. He had members of reigning houses under him in subordinate command-such as

Prince Louis of Baden and the Prince of Holstein. The jealous Dutch deputies solemnly conceded in their communications with him the etiquettes due to a sovereign. He called on that madcap Charles XII., as one friend on another, patted him on the back, and drew him off from some of the wildest and most dangerous of his eccentricities. Then Marlborough became himself a sovereign prince. He was invested with the principality of Mindelheim on the Danube, near that town of Hochstadt where he gained his crowning victory. He bore upon his coat-armorial the double-headed eagle of the sovereign princes of the Holy Roman Empire. When baffled in his design to march on Paris, there might have opened to him such a career as that followed by Wallenstein; but his nature soared above all such projects of wayward and mischievous ambition.

These few remarks go only to the point, not that his character should be spared in the examination of his conduct because of his greatness, but that it should be tested by other measures than those applicable to the ordinary run of respectabilities and disrespectabilities. To the adept in geological, mineralogical, and chemical science, the mammoth and the encrinite must both be examined with an equal devotion to abstract truth; yet the phenomena of the two will be found at distant extremes of animal nature. So of the basaltic crystallisations of the Giant's Causeway, and the specimens of fluor-spar or crystallised agates in the mineralogist's cabinet. It is the misfortune of history that there are disturbing elements in such inquiries; and the greater the historical nature to be examined, the more powerful are the distorting influences. This is not the place where an attempt can be made to

bring the whole question of Marlborough's character and conduct to what in parliamentary and diplomatic language is called "a satisfactory conclusion." There would be far too much elaborate establishment of matter of fact, and of close criticism in its tenor when it is established, to be accomplished in a casual paper.

We can but look on his character and career from without, saying a word on the qualities of grandeur and beauty that adorn them; and perhaps these can hardly be better felt than in reading the not enthusiastic estimate of him by two men who knew him-both great men— both unlike to him, and unlike to each other. The one of these was Bolingbroke, who said of him: "He was the soul of the Grand Alliance against the French. Although un homme nouveau a private individual-a subject-he acquired by his talent and activity a greater influence in public affairs than his high birth, established authority, and the crown of England, had procured for the Prince of Orange. Not only were all the parts of that great machine preserved by him more entire, and in a state of more complete union, but he, in a manner, animated the whole, and communicated to it a more rapid and better sustained movement. To the protracted and often disastrous campaigns which had taken place under the Prince of Orange, succeeded warlike scenes full of action; and all those in which he himself had the direction were crowned with the most brilliant success. He showed himself at once the greatest general and the most skilful minister of his time."

This is the saying of a statesman, his rival and enemy. The other is from a statesman too; but he speaks in the other character, more esteemed by himself, of a master of

the ceremonies. If a philosopher were said to be a good dancer, we would take a dancing-master's certificate on the point; so in the case of good riding, we would a huntsman's or a jockey's, as the case might be. So also, in the question of a man's possession of "the graces," we are safe in the hands of Chesterfield. Of Marlborough he said: "The Graces protected and promoted him." "His manner was irresistible." "It was by this engaging graceful manner that he was enabled during all the war to connect the various and jarring powers of the Grand Alliance, and to carry them on to the main object of the war, notwithstanding their private and separate views, jealousies, and wrongheadedness. Whatever Court he went to--and he was often obliged to go to restive and refractory ones -he brought them into his measures. The Pensionary Heinsius, who governed the United Provinces for forty years, was absolutely governed by him. He was always cool, and nobody ever observed the least variation in his countenance. He could refuse more easily than others could grant; and those who went from him the most dissatisfied as to the substance of their business, were yet charmed by his manner, and as it were comforted by it."

When his victorious career was suddenly stopped, and the Treaty of Utrecht carried, there was much lamentation on the one side, and but little exultation on the other, since it was not a creditable story to boast about that a waiting-maid had done it. And yet when we look back to it at this time, it is difficult to say that the treaty was a permanent calamity to Britain. We do not deal much in abstract glory, not deeming it a valuable

commodity unless it is the companion of duty and public benefit. Even a successful march to Paris might have brought more perplexity than permanent benefit to the British empire. The leaving the Bourbons on the throne of Spain, if a calamity, was not a measurable calamity: the country, if it might have had better, might have had worse governors; and in any case, the character of the governors it was to have could not be so weighed and anticipated that the one could be pronounced so much more valuable than the other as to justify a bloody war. Before the treaty, Marlborough had already done the real work whence Europe profited. It was to drive the demon of conquest and supremacy out of Louis XIV. and his successors on the throne of France, by showing that the power which seemed to aim at a new universal empire was assailable and subduable.

This was a service felt less by Britain than by Germany and the minor States of the Continent. At home, Marlborough's victorious career conferred on his country a blessing of another and a less dubious or questionable kind. Without it the union of England and Scotland might not have been effected; and the supposition of what might have been to both countries had the reign of Queen Anne passed without the accomplishment of that healing measure, opens up one of the most dreary and desperate vistas ever realised by those historical speculators who deal in the conditions that might have been but were not. Such speculations may be ridiculed as vain and useless; but we cannot estimate the public services of great men without some indulgence in them. It is impossible to look at the history of Eu