his tomb into a sanctuary for crime.  Receptacles of wickedness are suffered to remain undisturbed in the neighbourhood of the church which glories in the relics of some martyred apostle.  Because he was merciful, his bones give security to assassins.  Because he was chaste, the precinct of his temple is filled with licensed stews.  Privileges of an equally absurd kind have been set up against the jurisdiction of political philosophy.  Vile abuses cluster thick round every glorious event, round every venerable name; and this evil assuredly calls for vigorous measures of literary police.  But the proper course is to abate the nuisance without defacing the shrine, to drive out the gangs of thieves and prostitutes without doing foul and cowardly wrong to the ashes of the illustrious dead.

In this respect, two historians of our own time may be proposed as models, Sir James Mackintosh and Mr. Mill.  Differing in most things, in this they closely resemble each other.  Sir James is lenient.  Mr. Mill is severe.  But neither of them ever omits, in the apportioning of praise and of censure, to make ample allowance for the state of political science and political morality in former ages.  In the work before us, Sir James Mackintosh speaks with just respect of the Whigs of the Revolution, while he never fails to condemn the conduct of that party towards the members of the Church of Rome.  His doctrines are the liberal and benevolent doctrines of the nineteenth century.  But he never forgets that the men whom he is describing were men of the seventeenth century.

From Mr. Mill this indulgence, or, to speak more properly, this justice, was less to be expected.  That gentleman, in some of his works, appears to consider politics not as an experimental, and therefore a progressive science, but as a science of which all the difficulties may be resolved by short synthetical arguments drawn from truths of the most vulgar notoriety.  Were this opinion well founded, the people of one generation would have little or no advantage over those of another generation.  But though Mr. Mill, in some of his Essays, has been thus misled, as we conceive, by a fondness for neat and precise forms of demonstration, it would be gross injustice not to admit that, in his History, he has employed a very different method of investigation with eminent ability and success.  We know no writer who takes so much pleasure in the truly useful, noble and philosophical employment of tracing the progress of sound opinions from their embryo state to their full maturity.  He eagerly culls from old despatches and minutes every expression in which he can discern the imperfect germ of any great truth which has since been fully developed.  He never fails to bestow praise on those who, though far from coming up to his standard of perfection, yet rose in a small degree above the common level of their contemporaries.  It is thus that the annals of past times ought to be written.  It is thus, especially, that the annals of our own country ought to be written.