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ART. VI. History of the House of Commons, from the Convention Parliament of 1688-9, to the Passing of the Reform Bill in 1832. By CHARLES TOWNSEND, Esq., A.M., Recorder of Macclesfield. 2 vols.

A HISTORY of the House of Commons, from the Revolution of 1688 to the passing of the Reform Bill, unless strictly limited to matters of its internal constitution, its forms and privileges, would be little less than the history of England itself. Since the Revolution, the history of England has been prepared or enacted within the walls of the House of Commons. The intrigues of the court, the alliances with foreign states, the craft and subtlety of diplomacy, the favours of the monarch, the appointment even of the members of his household,-everything that finds a place in the history of a court or a people, finds a place also in the history of the proceedings of the House. The monarchy and the senate have become one and indivisible. If there is a back stairs to the palace of St. James, even this has its private communication with the chapel of St. Stephen.

Mr. Townsend has not limited his work to what is understood by constitutional history, and, in consequence, his work has no other limit than such as the size of his book imposed upon it. His object has been, he tells us, in the first sentence of his preface, to give us a popular history of the House of Commons, furnishing biographical notices of those members who have been most distinguished in its annals, and describing the changes in its internal economy, powers, and privileges.' It is evident that, once launched out on this biography of distinguished members of parliament, its leaders and its orators, there is no line to be drawn between his work and a general history of England, than such as the caprice of the author shall suggest. In this difficulty of selection and limitation, Mr. Townsend's professional studies, or professional partialities, have been his best and only guide. These have led him to select a number of lawyers for the subject of his biographical notice, who cannot certainly be said to have distinguished themselves in the annals of parliament, while men who have been ministers of the crown, and its most celebrated orators, have been passed over with scarce a casual mention of their names. Snatches of biography, most arbitrarily chosen, are interspersed with details appropriate to a constitutional history; and there is as little completeness or method in the one department of the work as in the other.

With a certain degree of plodding industry, our author succeeds in here and there conveying or recalling to the memory a useful or curious piece of information, and we shall be at the

pains of culling from his work some few details of this description. But, upon the whole, we never remember to have met with two octavo volumes, professing to treat on history, so barren and so purposeless. The materials collected, which are neither new nor rare, are spread, with a careless, aimless distribution, over the various epochs of our history. Even the order of chronology is little observed, and, lawyer as he is, he does not know even how to deal with dates. His literary industry has been limited to collecting from sources, neither remote nor original, facts and anecdotes which are again strung together without any law of arrangement, and related without any charm of style or manner. He reads and he reprints; his industry has been never or rarely exercised in verifying the truth, or testing the accuracy of what he reads. If any difficulty or obscurity occurs to him, he is perhaps good enough to point it out: he takes no pains to remove it. There is an amusing instance of this at p. 27, vol. ii. In his biography of Chancellor Cowper, who, according to his luminous principle of selection, becomes one of the distinguished members of Parliament, he thus introduces an anecdote illustrative of the dignity and courtesy' of that judge. In illustration of this graceful bearing, we find related a story of his considerate kind'ness towards Richard Cromwell, the former Protector, who, in the year 1705, was compelled to apply to the Court of Chancery against a daughter, litigating with him the title to a manor 'which he inherited from his mother, and on whom the counsel 'opposed had been casting some unworthy personal reflections. "It is doubtful, perhaps, whether the story does not in truth belong to a later period, and to a descendant of the Cromwells, instead of the Protector Richard. Miss Hawkins, however, tells it of Cowper, in the following circumstantial manner, on the alleged authority (derived through Charles Yorke) of Lord Hardwicke, 'who is stated to have been in court at the time-that indeed could scarcely be the case in 1705, for he was not then fifteen.' Our author evidently thinks that he has shown a very laudable discrimination in having, at all events, been puzzled. He has found a difficulty and proclaimed it; quite enough for one man to do; he leaves to some other erudite person the task of solving it. This utter want of plan or method in the work is by no means compensated by the character of the observations which are scattered through it. These are of the most lack-lustre description imaginable, the most trite and commonplace that could have been well put together. It is strange-this perseverance with which some men can reiterate the most thread-bare remark, the gravity with which they can announce the most trivial and childish!and men, too, who would not, perhaps, be slow in perceiving in

others the culpable dulness they themselves commit. The desire to write, harassing and irritating an intellect which has naturally no productive power, must, in general, be chargeable with this perverse obtuseness. But, in the case of Mr. Townsend, there is still another reason which might be given for this very complacent outpouring of commonplace. Mr. Townsend belongs to a profession which offers many advantages in the discipline of the mind, but-we hope we shall be pardoned for the liberty we are about to take with a learned body-but which has also this signal disadvantage-that it makes men utterly shameless of commonplace. The habit of regarding what is said as valuable, not in itself, but for some temporary and practical purpose, renders everything good enough which serves the turn. The finer intellectual wants, the finer intellectual perceptions, are dulled and blunted; the mind grows content with truths, so to speak, of the coarsest grain, which are always at hand, and of which it is needless to say there is always the greatest demand. One who practises public speaking as a profession, learns to be satisfied himself with that which will satisfy the occasion and his audience; and practising oratory, moreover, as an advocate for another, he learns to sacrifice, for the personal ends of that other, the higher and more refined claims of his own intellect. He cares not how often he repeats a truism; his tediousness lies upon his client, who is as much responsible for the prolixity, as for the aim and purpose of his discourse. The manner of his speech, as well as the cause it advocates, is the client's.

This habit of submitting his own reasoning powers to the claims of an immediate practical interest, generates, we think, in most lawyers, a very perceptible bluntness in appreciating the finer shades of abstract or speculative truth. We are not speaking here of that indifference to truth of any kind, which the champions of tongue-fence' are supposed to lapse into; our charge is of a quite different description, and involves no moral taint. In all matters of speculation, in all matters of philosophy, we have often had occasion to remark how incurious the minds of lawyers generally are. Their mental susceptibility seems to have been injured. With the finest tact, with the utmost rapidity and precision of thought, within a certain range, and for certain practical purposes, they unite a self-satisfied indifference for all that lies beyond. In theology, no men more sedulously avoid whatever approaches to general reasoning, to broad and noble principles; if a lawyer is a divine, he clings to his texts and his authorities, or argues skilfully upon premises which he shows little disposition to examine. Should it become the fashion to moot the points of controversy between the churches

of England and of Rome, we should expect-presuming that no civil disabilities stood in the way-to find amongst the acute pleaders of Westminster Hall a large proportion of convertites to the Papal church. Trained to ratiocination, averse to philosophy, they have already the very intellect of the Jesuit. To deal ably with propositions, to have no passion for truth-such are the qualities a priestly controversialist would wish to find in his pupil.

Some, who may not feel the same profound respect as we do for this learned profession, may resolve all we have said into that habitual self-confidence, which the lawyer cultivates, in the first instance, as a necessary discipline for his vocation, and which he is apt to carry with him into subjects not strictly professional. But we rest little on this, because we have observed a similar misapplication of self-confidence in men of all descriptions, who have studied with success any special branch of knowledge; they are incapable of admitting, in themselves, any inaptitude or deficiency in those general branches of knowledge which seem to lie open to all the world. A profound mathematician, as well as an erudite lawyer, will rarely understand that it requires any apprenticeship to be a good reasoner in morals or philosophy. The man who happens to have read extensively, or thought much on these subjects, never imagines, on this account, that he can answer a case in law, or solve a difficult problem of mathematics; but the able mathematician is often unwilling to confess that he is. not an equally good moral reasoner; and the man who is immersed in legal lore, or legal quibble, who is full of his remainders and reversions, his uses and trusts, or who is armed to the teeth with those quirks of pleading and of evidence, by which an action at law is fought out on either side, with as much reference to the real justice of the case, as if so much musketry were discharged by the rival litigants-the man whose whole learning is a curiosity, and has the same relation to science and wisdom that a lusus naturæ has to the living and growing products of nature—such a man will hardly be convinced that philosophy has anything to teach him; that one who is in the constant habit of being consulted could possibly receive instruction; or that one so voluble in speech could be deficient in thought.

Whether there be any truth or not in these observations, it is certain that Mr. Townsend exhibits in himself a very complete specimen of self-satisfied mediocrity. It is manifest that he could go on prating or writing by the hour together, on any subject, without disturbing, to the depth of a finger-nail, the surface on which he was standing. He interlards his discourse with quotations of verse, picked and culled for their very in

sipidity, and plumes himself the while on his taste for the belles lettres. He quotes mere fustian, and calls it eloquence, and pronounces his egregious judgment with the air of profound criticism. And who shall prevent him? Has he not read some twenty score of volumes, big and little ?-and can he not talk, talk irresistibly, irrepressibly, inexhaustibly?—and has he not, withal, that pretty little bantering impudence, that tawdry studied flippancy, which so often proclaims and supports the superior pretensions of the man accustomed to face the public ?

We remember being once in the company of somewhat grave and silent people, when a lady broke a long pause of stillness, by the startling request, Pray, Mr. B-, do make a remark.' Whether the remark thus called for was made, we do not recollect; it was not likely to be very worthy of remembrance. Our author seems to have jogged his own invention in a similar manner, and from time to time, in the course of his dull narrative, to have called upon himself strenuously to make a remark. And Mr. Townsend has made a remark, and printed it. The Duke of Marlborough, as every one knows, had received a very scanty education in his youth, and spelt badly. Whereupon our author takes occasion to make a remark. 'This and other letters prove 'the Duke's want of scholarship and bad spelling; but the absence of all faith and honesty is far more disgraceful to the writer than mere ignorance of grammar.' (Vol. i. p. 125.) Profound ob

servation!

'Returned for Windsor, he (Mr. Powle) was voted by a unanimous call to the chair, the 22nd January, 1688-9, and thus ' attained the highest station to which a statesman could aspirespeaker of the Convention Parliament!' (Vol. i. p. 47.) Did Mr. Townsend really think, when he wrote this, that the speakership was exactly the dignity, and the very highest, for a statesman to aspire to? We should think the leadership of the House of Commons something more to the purpose. We should suppose that this was merely a little flourish of the pen, a way of Mr. Townsend's of shewing his sympathy in the great events of the Revolution; but this is not the only passage in which he expresses himself in the same manner of the dignity of the speakership. He seems to have formed a peculiar and childish estimate of this dignity. Do the wig and robe of the semi-judicial functionary impose on the imagination of the Recorder of Macclesfield?

Turning over the page from which we have taken the above extract, we stumble upon an instance which may serve, as well as any other, to show what sort of appreciation our author boasts of the beauties of poetry. He is speaking of the imprisonment of the Earl of Oxford, and of the manner in which he supported