Those who have succeeded in this arduous undertaking form a very small and a very remarkable class.  Parents of tyranny, heirs of freedom, kings among citizens, citizens among kings, they unite in themselves the characteristics of the system which springs from them, and those of the system from which they have sprung.  Their reigns shine with a double light, the last and dearest rays of departing freedom mingled with the first and brightest glories of empire in its dawn.  The high qualities of such a prince lend to despotism itself a charm drawn from the liberty under which they were formed, and which they have destroyed.  He resembles an European who settles within the Tropics, and carries thither the strength and the energetic habits acquired in regions more propitious to the constitution.  He differs as widely from princes nursed in the purple of imperial cradles, as the companions of Gama from their dwarfish and imbecile progeny, which, born in a climate unfavourable to its growth and beauty, degenerates more and more, at every descent, from the qualities of the original conquerors.

In this class three men stand pre-eminent, Caesar, Cromwell, and Bonaparte.  The highest place in this remarkable triumvirate belongs undoubtedly to Caesar.  He united the talents of Bonaparte to those of Cromwell; and he possessed also, what neither Cromwell nor Bonaparte possessed, learning, taste, wit, eloquence, the sentiments and the manners of an accomplished gentleman.

Between Cromwell and Napoleon Mr. Hallam has instituted a parallel, scarcely less ingenious than that which Burke has drawn between Richard Coeur de Lion and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden.  In this parallel, however, and indeed throughout his work, we think that he hardly gives Cromwell fair measure.  “Cromwell,” says he, “far unlike his antitype, never showed any signs of a legislative mind, or any desire to place his renown on that noblest basis, the amelioration of social institutions.”  The difference in this respect, we conceive, was not in the character of the men, but in the character of the revolutions by means of which they rose to power.  The civil war in England had been undertaken to defend and restore; the republicans of France set themselves to destroy.  In England, the principles of the common law had never been disturbed, and most even of its forms had been held sacred.  In France, the law and its ministers had been swept away together.  In France, therefore, legislation necessarily became the first business of the first settled government which rose on the ruins of the old system.  The admirers of Inigo Jones have always maintained that his works are inferior to those of Sir Christopher Wren, only because the great fire of London gave Wren such a field for the display of his powers as no architect in the history of the world ever possessed.  Similar allowance must be made for Cromwell.  If he erected little that was new, it was because there had been no general