After so much political detail it will be some kind of diversion to our readers to examine Mr. Macaulay’s most elaborate strategic and topographical effort, worked up with all the combined zeal and skill of an ex-Secretary-at-War and a pictorial historian—­a copious description of the battle of Sedgemoor.  Mr. Macaulay seems to have visited Bridgwater with a zeal worthy of a better result:  for it has produced a description of the surrounding country as pompous and detailed as if it had been the scene of some grand strategic operations—­a parade not merely unnecessary, but absurd, for the so-called battle was but a bungling skirmish.  Monmouth had intended to surprise the King’s troops in their quarters by a midnight attack, but was stopped by a wide and deep trench, of which he was not apprised, called Bussex Rhine, behind which the King’s army lay.  “The trenches which drain the moor are,” Mr. Macaulay adds, “in that country called rhines.”  On each side of this ditch the parties stood firing at each other in the dark.  Lord Grey and the cavalry ran away without striking a blow; Monmouth followed them, too, soon; for some time the foot stood with a degree of courage and steadiness surprising in such raw and half-armed levies; at last the King’s cavalry got round their flank, and they too ran:  the King’s foot then crossed the ditch with little or no resistance, and slaughtered, with small loss on their own side, a considerable number of the fugitives, the rest escaping back to Bridgwater.  Our readers will judge whether such a skirmish required a long preliminary description of the surrounding country.  Mr. Macaulay might just as usefully have described the plain of Troy.  Indeed at the close of his long topographical and etymological narrative Mr. Macaulay has the tardy candour to confess that—­

little is now to be learned by visiting the field of battle, for the face of the country has been greatly changed, and the old Bussex Rhine, on the banks of which the great struggle took place, has long disappeared.

This is droll.  After spending a deal of space and fine writing in describing the present prospect, he concludes by telling us candidly it is all of no use, for the whole scene has changed.  This is like Walpole’s story of the French lady who asked for her lover’s picture; and when he demurred observing that, if her husband were to see it, it might betray their secret—­“O dear, no,” she said—­just like Mr. Macaulay—­“I will have the picture, but it need not be like!”

But even as to the change, we again doubt Mr. Macaulay’s accuracy.  The word Rhine in Somersetshire, as perhaps—­parva componere magnis—­in the great German river, means running water, and we therefore think it very unlikely that a running stream should have disappeared; but we also find in the Ordnance Survey of Somersetshire, made in our own time, the course and name of Bussck’s Rhine distinctly laid down in front of Weston, where it probably ran in Monmouth’s day; and we are further informed, in return to some inquiries that we have caused to be made, that the Rhine is now, in 1849, as visible and well known as ever it was.