It is with unfeigned diffidence that we venture to give our opinion of the last work of Sir James Mackintosh.  We have in vain tried to perform what ought to be to a critic an easy and habitual act.  We have in vain tried to separate the book from the writer, and to judge of it as if it bore some unknown name.  But it is to no purpose.  All the lines of that venerable countenance are before us.  All the little peculiar cadences of that voice from which scholars and statesmen loved to receive the lessons of a serene and benevolent wisdom are in our ears.  We will attempt to preserve strict impartiality.  But we are not ashamed to own that we approach this relic of a virtuous and most accomplished man with feelings of respect and gratitude which may possibly pervert our judgment.

It is hardly possible to avoid instituting a comparison between this work and another celebrated Fragment.  Our readers will easily guess that we allude to Mr. Fox’s History of James the Second.  The two books relate to the same subject.  Both were posthumously published.  Neither had received the last corrections.  The authors belonged to the same political party, and held the same opinions concerning the merits and defects of the English constitution, and concerning most of the prominent characters and events in English history.  Both had thought much on the principles of government; yet they were not mere speculators.  Both had ransacked the archives of rival kingdoms, and pored on folios which had mouldered for ages in deserted libraries; yet they were not mere antiquaries.  They had one eminent qualification for writing history:  they had spoken history, acted history, lived history.  The turns of political fortune, the ebb and flow of popular feeling, the hidden mechanism by which parties are moved, all these things were the subjects of their constant thought and of their most familiar conversation.  Gibbon has remarked that he owed part of his success as a historian to the observations which he had made as an officer in the militia and as a member of the House of Commons.  The remark is most just.  We have not the smallest doubt that his campaign, though he never saw an enemy, and his parliamentary attendance, though he never made a speech, were of far more use to him than years of retirement and study would have been.  If the time that he spent on parade and at mess in Hampshire, or on the Treasury bench and at Brookes’s during the storms which overthrew Lord North and Lord Shelburne, had been passed in the Bodleian Library, he might have avoided some inaccuracies; he might have enriched his notes with a greater number of references; but he would never have produced so lively a picture of the court, the camp, and the senate-house.  In this respect Mr. Fox and Sir James Mackintosh had great advantages over almost every English historian who has written since the time of Burnet.  Lord Lyttelton had indeed the same advantages; but he was incapable of using them.  Pedantry was so deeply fixed in his nature that the hustings, the Treasury, the Exchequer, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, left him the same dreaming schoolboy that they found him.