With regard to his treatment of the Reformation, and especially of the Church of England, it is very difficult to give our readers an adequate idea.  Throughout a system of depreciation—­we had almost said insult—­is carried on:  sneers, sarcasms, injurious comparisons, sly misrepresentations, are all adroitly mingled throughout the narrative, so as to produce an unfavourable impression, which the author has not the frankness to attempt directly.  Even when obliged to approach the subject openly, it is curious to observe how, under a slight veil of impartiality, imputations are raised and calumnies accredited.  For instance, early in the first volume he gives us his view of the English Reformation, as a kind of middle term, emerging out of the antagonist struggles of the Catholics and Calvinists:  and it is impossible not to see that, between the three parties, he awards to the Catholics the merit of unity and consistency; to the Calvinists, of reason and independence; to the Anglicans, the lowest motives of expediency and compromise.  To enforce this last topic he relies on the inconsistencies, some real and some imaginary, imputed to Cranmer, whose notions of worldly expedience he chooses to represent as the source of the Anglican Church....

Every one of the circumstances on which we may presume that Mr. Macaulay would rely as justifying these charges has been long since, to more candid judgments, either disproved, explained, or excused, and in truth whatever blame can be justly attributed to any of them, belongs mainly, if not exclusively, to those whose violence and injustice drove a naturally upright and most conscientious man into the shifts and stratagems of self-defence.  With the greatest fault and the only crime that Charles in his whole life committed Mr. Macaulay does not reproach him—­the consent to the execution of Lord Strafford—­that indeed, as he himself penitentially confessed, was a deadly weight on his conscience, and is an indelible stain on his character; but even that guilt and shame belongs in a still greater degree to Mr. Macaulay’s patriot heroes.

This leads us to the conclusive plea which we enter to Mr. Macaulay’s indictment, namely—­that all those acts alleged as the excuses of rebellion and regicide occurred after the rebellion had broken out, and were at worst only devices of the unhappy King to escape from the regicide which he early foresaw.  It was really the old story of the wolf and the lamb.  It was far down the stream of rebellion that these acts of supposed perfidy on the part of Charles could be said to have troubled it.

But while he thus deals with the lamb, let us see how he treats the wolf.  We have neither space nor taste for groping through the long and dark labyrinth of Cromwell’s proverbial duplicity and audacious apostacy:  we shall content ourselves with two facts, which, though stated in the gentlest way by Mr. Macaulay, will abundantly justify the opinion which all mankind, except a few republican zealots,