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    against the "Western principle of self-government by representation , the minutest proceedings of Peter and Catherine of Russia will become as interesting as any incidents in the lives of Greek or Roman heroes . Generations yet unborn will watch "with eager eyes the pulling down of Finnish huts in the marshes , to make way for palaces of stone ; and the last waving of the bulrushes and reeds , where trim gardens were henceforth to be ; and the first dimple in the surface of stagnant lakes , when the canals were ready to drain them away ; and the placing of block upon block , as the granite embankments rose along the

    Neva , raising it from a waste of fetid , waters into a metropolitan river . This river may turn out to be our modern Rubicon ; and the stroke of Peter ' s hammer on the ship-side at Saardam may send a loader echo through future generations than to the ear of our own time . This great empire , seeking admission among the European states , at first alarmed them ; and the audacious and aspiring cast of mind of Peter and Catherine justified such apprehension far the time . But it soon appeared that their efficiency beyond their own territory bore no proportion to their ambition , and that they were not likely to prove themselves potentates except within their own boundary . "

    The history of this century is emphatically the history of the popular advancement ; and , while occupied with changes of cabinet , and the incidents of political life , Miss Martineau is careful to keep steadily before our eyes the condition of the people . Here is a picture of

    THE ENGLISH PJFTY YEARS A 0 O . ' It is common to us to hear and to say that the temper of the times , fifty years ago , was warlike , though , in fact , the people were beginning to have , and to express , a passionate desire for peace . To say that the temper of the times was warlike , gives no idea , to us , who can scarcely remember war ' times , of the spirit of violence , and the barbaric habits of thought and life , which then prevailed . Everything seems , in the records , to have suffered a war change . The gravest annalists , the most educated public men , called the First Consul ' the Corsican murderer , '

    and so forth , through the whole vocabulary of abuse . Nelson ' s first precept of professional morality was to hate a Frenchman as you . would the devil . Government rule took the form of coercion ; and popular discontent , that of rebellion ; and suffering , that of riot . The passionate order of crime showed itself slaughterous ; the me ; in kind - exercised itself in peculation of military and naval provisions . Affliction took its character from the war . Tens of thousands of widows , and hundreds of thousands of orphans , were weeping or starving in the mid ^ t of soi-iety ; and among the starving were a multitude

    of the families of employed sailors , who were sent off on long voyages , while their pay was three or four years in arrear . The mutiny , which spread half round our coasts , was a natural , almost a nece .-sary consequence . Because it was suppressed , ' it does not follow that the feelings connected with it were extinguished . In Wilberforce's Diary we find an expression of strong regret that the officers do not love the sailors , ' such being , he observes , the consequence of fear entering into such a relation—fear on the part of superiors . The sufferings from bad seasons , again , were aggravated by a taxation growing heavier

    every year , and money running shorter every day—all on account of the war . The very sports of the time took their character from the same class of influences . The world went to see reviews , at which the King ( when well ) appeared on horseback . Then , there were illuminations for victories ; and funerals of prodigious grandeur , when military and navnl officers of eminence were to be buried in places of honour . There were presentations of jewelled swords , in provincial cities as well as in London ; and , from the metropolitan theatre to the puppet-show , there were celebrations und representations of combats by sea or land . The inhabitants of towns came to their windows and doors at the tramp of cavalry ; ladies ^ reHcnted colours to regiments ; and children played at soldiers the

    on village green , Prayers and thanksgivings in church and chitpol—services utterly confounding now to the moral kciiho of a time which has leisure to nee that Christianity in a religion of brotherly love—then met with a loud response which had in it a hard tone of worldly passion ; and from church and chapel , the congregation took a walk to see the Sunday drill . Manufacturers and tradesmen contested vehemently for army and navy contracts ; and the bankrupt list in the Gazette showed a large proportion of drpendentHonarniy and navy contractors who could not get paid . If the vices and miseries of tho time took their character from the war , thero was a fully corresponding manifestation of virtue . From Pitt at the head , down to tho humblest peasant or the moat timid woman in tho remotest corner of

    the kingdom , all who were- worthy were animated by the appeals of the times , and magnanimity came out in all directions . Tho courage was not only in tho Nelsons and the WollesloyH ; it was in the houI of the sailor ' s love , and the grey-haired fattier of tho soldier , when thaif ^ hearts beat at the thought of fcattfofliAd 3 ») h thf ^ r of invasion . Tho self-denial " : ' 'A

    • was found all abroad , from the Pitt who could respectfully support an Addington Ministry , and a Wilberforce whocurtailed his luxuries , and exceeded his income by £ 3000 in one year , to feed the poor in the scarcity , down to the sister who dismissed her brother to the wars with a smile , and the operative who worked extra hours when he should have slept —all sustained alike by the thought that they were obeying a call of their country , it was ft phrase of the national life which should be preserved in vivid representation , for it own value , as well as because it may be a curious spectacle to a future age . "

    Let any one compare the following portraits with the balanced sentences and tawdry rhetoric which male historians , for the most part , obtrude upon our contempt , and then say whether the prejudice about women being incompetent to write history is worth refuting ; - —

    PITT . " His temper was so sanguine as to impair his sagacity throughout his whole career . He was always found tmsting our allies abroad—not only their good faith and ability , but their good fortune . He was always found expecting that the Austrians would defeat Napoleon in the next battle ; believing that the plan of every campaign was admirable and inexpugnable ; immoveably convinced that what he considered the right must prevail—not only in the long run , but at every step . If his fortitude of soul and sweetness of temper had not incessantly overborne his imperfection of judgment , his career must have ended very early ; for his failures were incessant .

    Such a repetition of failures would not have been permitted to any man whose personal greatness and sweetness did not overbear other peoples faculties as much as his own . If it is impossible now to read his private letters , written in the darkest hours of his official adversities , without a throbbing of the heart at the calm fortitude and indomitable hopefulness of their tone , it may be easily conceived how overpowering was the influence of these qualities over the minds of the small men , and the superficial men , and the congenial men , and the affectionate idolaters , by whom he was surrounded . If any of these doubted whether the Austrians would

    win the next battle , it was not till they went home and sank into themselves ; and then they did not tell him so . If any of them feared Napoleon more than they trusted plans of a campaign , it was not while his bright eye was upon them , and his eloquence of hope was filling their ears ; and when they relapsed into dread , they did not tell him so . The restless , suspicious , worrying , obstinate , ignorant mind of the half-insane King was laid at rest ior the hour when they were together ; and the charm which invested the minister made him for those hours the sovereign over his master . It was no wonder that all this did him harm , and tended to impair still further his already weak sagacity . When he carried his accustomed methods into the

    eonduct of critical affairs or of domestic politics , it could not be but that , sooner or later , he must find himself involved in some tremendous difficulty . He was always kept in the dark about one thing or another that , it was important for him to know . Nobody ever hinted to him that he was wrong ; nobody ever called him to account ; there were none but party foes to show him the other side of any question . Holding his head high above the jobbers and selfseekers about him , and never looking down into their dirty tricks , or giving ear to their selfish cravings , except to get rid of them by gratifying them—too easil

    y , no doubt , but with a heedless contempt ; resorting for sympathy und counsel to the best of his friends , and then finding liftle hut open-hearted idolatry , it is no wonder that he was unguarded , overconfident , and virtually , though not consciously , despotic . Despotic he was throughout . His comrades , including the King , revelled in the despotism , on account of its charm . The suffering people felt the worst of the despotism without any of the charm . While this host of sufferers wan growing restless under the burdens of the war , and some of them frantic- under the repression of their civil liberties ;

    while the Northern Powers were bunding against us , to cut off our commerce and humble our naval pride ; while Napoleon \ vnn marshalling ; his 600 , 000 soldiers on their coast , ko that they could be seen irom our clifld on a sunny day ; while the frame of the great minister was weighing down under the secret griefs and mortifications which he never breathtul to human ear , ho involved himself by his constitutional and huhitual faults in a fog of diiliculty , which darkened the opening of thenewcentuiy , and poiHonedhis and his life

    peace . He scarcely abated the loftiness of his carriage ia the midst of it ; he manifested a higher magnanimity than ever before ; lus patienco and gentleness almost intoxicated the moral sense of his adorers ; he seemed tq forget all cares in reading Aristophanes and reel ting Horace or Lucan with his young friend Canning under tho trees at sunset , or kept together parties of frienduladies , children , and all-round tho hi etude till past midnight , by his flow ot rich discourse ; but his spirit was breaking . He had learned what fear was ; and it was n foar which brought remorse with it .

    No remorse for the slaughter of the war ; no remorse for the woes of widows and orphans ; no remorse for having overborne the Englishman ' s liberty of speeoh , and political action . About these things he appears to have had no sensibility . He had no popular sympathies ; though he certainly Would have had , if the people had ever come before his eyes , or he had had that high faculty of imagination which might have brought them before the eye of his mind . To him , the people were an abstraction ; and he had no turn for abstractions . The nearest approach he made to entertaining abstractions was in acting for the national glory and international duty . His view

    was probably right , as far as it went ; but it was imperfect—so imperfect that he may be pronounced unfit for such a place as he held , in such times . His remorse was for nothing of this kind ; but for his having done that which caused a return of the King's insanity , and , by that consequence , compelled him to break faith with the Catholics . He always denied —and everybody believes him—that any express pledge was given to the Catholics ; but nobody denies that those of them who agreed to the Union did so under an authorized expectation that they

    might send representatives out of their own body to Parliament . This expectation he found himself compelled to disappoint . He was not one to acknowledge the effect upon himself of such a difficulty as had arisen through his means ; but all who loved him immediately saw , and those who opposed him soon learned , that the peace of his mind and the brilliancy of his life were overshadowed . But a short term of life remained ; and that had much bitterness in it—so much , that it was truly a bitterness unto death . He died broken-hearted .

    nelson . " The naval power of Prance and Spain was destroyed . We had nothing more to fear at sea that part of our warfare might be considered closed ; but Nelson was gone ; and no one , from Pitt down to the humblest man born on British ground , knew whether most to rejoice or to mourn . Their peculiar hero was lost ; the greatest naval commander that the world had produced ; and nothing could be a compensation for his loss . Peculiar indeed Nelson was : peculiarly British , among other things . While full fraught with the genius which belongs to no country , he had the qualities , almost in excess , which

    Britons are apt to call British . His whole frame of body and mind seem 8 to have overflowed with an electric sensibility , by which his own life was made one series of emotions , and his own being seemed to communicate itself to all others . Every man , woman , and child , who came near him was heroic : and in himself were mingled emotions which rarely meet in the same soul . Few would have the courage to entertain at once , as he did , guilt and piety , remorse and confidence , paroxysms of weakness and inspirations of strength . Except as his native vigour wrought as discipline , he was undisciplined . He was as vehement in his modes of expression as in his

    feelings ; and he appears to have made no effort whatever to preserve his domestic virtue , and withstand the guilty passion which poisoned his life , and that of his innocent wife , and which mingles pity and disgust with the admiration and gratitude of an idolizing nation . His piety was not only warm , but most presumptuous in the midst of his helpless guilt . He prayed glowingly and confidently ; but then , it wag not like the prayer of any one else . It was petition as to a Superior Power enlisted against the French , which , on such an occasion , would not deal with him about Lady Hamilton . This view , unconsciously held , was no doubt natural ; for it was that of the people generally . No one wanted to deal

    with him , as others are dealt with by society , for his domestic guilt , while he was to the popular eye like an angel with a flaming sword , God-sent to deliver the country . To the people , he was now the champion and the sailor ; and he was adored as he , in that view , deserved to be . The disclosures of after years , and the ethical judgment which , sooner or later , follows upon a passionate idolatry , have made tho name and image of Nelson now very different from what they were on tho day of his funeral ; but still he is truly regarded as the greatest of naval captains ; a » worthy of all honour for bravery , humanity , professional disinterestedness , and devoted zeal ; and as commanding even a deeper admiration by the delicacy of his sensibilities on behalf of his country and his comrades . His

    passions and weaknesses were bo clearly the misory of his life , that to point them out as being so is , perhaps , a sufficient reprobation . In the ecstacy of their gratitude , the nation mourned thut they could do nothing but heap honoura on tho memory of" their hero , and on all whom ho had loft to whom they could do honour without shaming him and tliem-H < : lve » . His brother wn « made an carl , with an income of £ (> 000 a-year : his sistera were presented with £ 10 , 000 each ; and £ 100 , 000 were voted for the purchase of an estate . All this would not Imvo natiHded him ; for , in the last paper ho wroto , on tho day of hi « death , tho paper which wado the nation hi * executor , he thrust ins relations into a eort of poptnOript . It was Emma Hamilton whom he bequeathed to tho nation ' s care , with a curious

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    516 JTfte He&ire t * [ Saturday ,

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), May 31, 1851, page 516, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1885/page/16/