We premise that we are about to enter into details, because there is in fact little to question or debate about but details.  We have already hinted that there is absolutely no new fact of any consequence, and, we think we can safely add, hardly a new view of any historical fact, in the whole book.  Whatever there may remain questionable or debatable in the history of the period, we should have to argue with Burnet, Dalrymple, or Mackintosh, and not with Mr. Macaulay.  It would, we know, have a grander air if we were to make his book the occasion of disquisitions on the rise and progress of the constitution—­on the causes by which the monarchy of the Tudors passed, through the murder of Charles, to the despotism of Cromwell—­how again that produced a restoration which settled none of the great moral or political questions which had generated all those agitations, and which, in return, those agitations had complicated and inflamed—­and how, at last, the undefined, discordant, and antagonistic pretensions of the royal and democratical elements were reconciled by the Revolution and the Bill of Rights—­and finally, whether with too much or too little violence to the principles of the ancient constitution—­all these topics, we say, would, if we were so inclined, supply us, as they have supplied Mr. Macaulay, with abundant opportunities of grave tautology and commonplace; but we decline to raise sham debates on points where there is no contest.  We can have little historic difference, properly so called, with one who has no historical difference on the main facts with anybody else:  instead, then, of pretending to treat any great questions, either of constitutional learning or political philosophy, we shall confine ourselves to the humbler but more practical and more useful task above stated.

Our first complaint is of a comparatively small and almost mechanical, and yet very real, defect—­the paucity and irregularity of his dates, and the mode in which the few that he does give are overlaid, as it were, by the text.  This, though it may be very convenient to the writer, and quite indifferent to the reader, of an historical romance, is perplexing to any one who might wish to read and weigh the book as a serious history, of which dates are the guides and landmarks; and when they are visibly neglected we cannot but suspect that the historian will be found not very solicitous about strict accuracy.  This negligence is carried to such an extent that, in what looks like a very copious table of contents, one of the most important events of the whole history—­ that, indeed, on which the Revolution finally turned—­the marriage of Princess Mary to the Prince of Orange, is not noticed; nor is any date affixed to the very cursory mention of it in the text.  It is rather hard to force the reader who buys this last new model history, in general so profuse of details, to recur to one of the old-fashioned ones to discover that this important event happened in the year 1675, and on the 4th of November—­a day thrice over remarkable in William’s history—­for his birth, his marriage, and his arrival with his invading army on the coast of Devon.