When we compare the two interesting works of which we have been speaking, we have little difficulty in giving the preference to that of Sir James Mackintosh.  Indeed, the superiority of Mr. Fox to Sir James as an orator is hardly more clear than the superiority of Sir James to Mr. Fox as a historian.  Mr. Fox with a pen in his hand, and Sir James on his legs in the House of Commons, were, we think, each out of his proper element.  They were men, it is true, of far too much judgment and ability to fail scandalously in any undertaking to which they brought the whole power of their minds.  The History of James the Second will always keep its place in our libraries as a valuable book; and Sir James Mackintosh succeeded in winning and maintaining a high place among the parliamentary speakers of his time.  Yet we could never read a page of Mr. Fox’s writing, we could never listen for a quarter of an hour to the speaking of Sir James, without feeling that there was a constant effort, a tug up hill.  Nature, or habit which had become nature, asserted its rights.  Mr. Fox wrote debates.  Sir James Mackintosh spoke essays.

As far as mere diction was concerned, indeed, Mr. Fox did his best to avoid those faults which the habit of public speaking is likely to generate.  He was so nervously apprehensive of sliding into some colloquial incorrectness, of debasing his style by a mixture of parliamentary slang, that he ran into the opposite error, and purified his vocabulary with a scrupulosity unknown to any purist.  “Ciceronem Allobroga dixit.”  He would not allow Addison, Bolingbroke, or Middleton to be a sufficient authority for an expression.  He declared that he would use no word which was not to be found in Dryden.  In any other person we should have called this solicitude mere foppery; and, in spite of all our admiration for Mr. Fox, we cannot but think that his extreme attention to the petty niceties of language was hardly worthy of so manly and so capacious an understanding.  There were purists of this kind at Rome; and their fastidiousness was censured by Horace, with that perfect good sense and good taste which characterise all his writings.  There were purists of this kind at the time of the revival of letters; and the two greatest scholars of that time raised their voices, the one from within, the other from without the Alps, against a scrupulosity so unreasonable.  “Carent,” said Politian, “quae scribunt isti viribus et vita, carent actu, carent effectu, carent indole . . .  Nisi liber ille praesto sit ex quo quid excerpant, colligere tria verba non possunt . . .  Horum semper igitur oratio tremula, vacillans, infirma . . .  Quaeso ne ista superstitione te alliges . . .  Ut bene currere non potest qui pedem ponere studet in alienis tantum vestigiis, ita nec bene scribere qui tanquam de praetscripto non audet egredi.”—­“Posthac,” exclaims Erasmus, “non licebit episcopos appellare patres reverendos, nec in calce literarum scribere annum a Christo nato, quod id nusquam faciat Cicero.  Quid autem ineptius quam, toto seculo novato, religione, imperiis, magistratibus, locorum vocabulis, aedificiis, cultu, moribus, non aliter audere loqui quam locutus est Cicero?  Si revivisceret ipse Cicero, rideret hoc Ciceronianorum genus.”