delight the great awakening of the French nation.  Yet he never, in the season of his warmest enthusiasm, proclaimed doctrines inconsistent with the safety of property and the just authority of governments.  He, like almost every other honest and enlightened man, was discouraged and perplexed by the terrible events which followed.  Yet he never in the most gloomy times abandoned the cause of peace, of liberty, and of toleration.  In that great convulsion which overset almost every other understanding, he was indeed so much shaken that he leaned sometimes in one direction and sometimes in the other; but he never lost his balance.  The opinions in which he at last reposed, and to which, in spite of strong temptations, he adhered with a firm, a disinterested, an ill-requited fidelity, were a just mean between those which he had defended with youthful ardour and with more than manly prowess against Mr. Burke, and those to which he had inclined during the darkest and saddest years in the history of modern Europe.  We are much mistaken if this be the picture either of a weak or of a dishonest mind.

What the political opinions of Sir James Mackintosh were in his later years is written in the annals of his country.  Those annals will sufficiently refute what the Editor has ventured to assert in the very advertisement to this work.  “Sir James Mackintosh,” says he, “was avowedly and emphatically a Whig of the Revolution:  and since the agitation of religious liberty and parliamentary reform became a national movement, the great transaction of 1688 has been more dispassionately, more correctly, and less highly estimated.”  If these words mean anything, they must mean that the opinions of Sir James Mackintosh concerning religious liberty and parliamentary reform went no further than those of the authors of the Revolution; in other words, that Sir James Mackintosh opposed Catholic Emancipation, and approved of the old constitution of the House of Commons.  The allegation is confuted by twenty volumes of Parliamentary Debates, nay, by innumerable passages in the very fragment which this writer has defaced.  We will venture to say that Sir James Mackintosh often did more for religious liberty and for parliamentary reform in a quarter of an hour than most of those zealots who are in the habit of depreciating him have done or will do in the whole course of their lives.

Nothing in the “Memoir” or in the “Continuation of the History” has struck us so much as the contempt with which the writer thinks fit to speak of all things that were done before the coming in of the very last fashions in politics.  We think that we have sometimes observed a leaning towards the same fault in writers of a much higher order of intellect.  We will therefore take this opportunity of making a few remarks on an error which is, we fear, becoming common, and which appears to us not only absurd, but as pernicious as almost any error concerning the transactions of a past age can possibly be.