From the moment that Cromwell is dead and buried, we go on in almost perfect harmony with Mr. Hallam to the end of his book.  The times which followed the Restoration peculiarly require that unsparing impartiality which is his most distinguishing virtue.  No part of our history, during the last three centuries, presents a spectacle of such general dreariness.  The whole breed of our statesmen seems to have degenerated; and their moral and intellectual littleness strikes us with the more disgust, because we see it placed in immediate contrast with the high and majestic qualities of the race which they succeeded.  In the great civil war, even the bad cause had been rendered respectable and amiable by the purity and elevation of mind which many of its friends displayed.  Under Charles the Second, the best and noblest of ends was disgraced by means the most cruel and sordid.  The rage of faction succeeded to the love of liberty.  Loyalty died away into servility.  We look in vain among the leading politicians of either side for steadiness of principle, or even for that vulgar fidelity to party which, in our time, it is esteemed infamous to violate.  The inconsistency, perfidy, and baseness, which the leaders constantly practised, which their followers defended, and which the great body of the people regarded, as it seems, with little disapprobation, appear in the present age almost incredible.  In the age of Charles the First, they would, we believe, have excited as much astonishment.

Man, however, is always the same.  And when so marked a difference appears between two generations, it is certain that the solution may be found in their respective circumstances.  The principal statesmen of the reign of Charles the Second were trained during the civil war and the revolutions which followed it.  Such a period is eminently favourable to the growth of quick and active talents.  It forms a class of men, shrewd, vigilant, inventive; of men whose dexterity triumphs over the most perplexing combinations of circumstances, whose presaging instinct no sign of the times can elude.  But it is an unpropitious season for the firm and masculine virtues.  The statesman who enters on his career at such a time, can form no permanent connections, can make no accurate observations on the higher parts of political science.  Before he can attach himself to a party, it is scattered.  Before he can study the nature of a government, it is overturned.  The oath of abjuration comes close on the oath of allegiance.  The association which was subscribed yesterday is burned by the hangman to-day.  In the midst of the constant eddy and change, self-preservation becomes the first object of the adventurer.  It is a task too hard for the strongest head to keep itself from becoming giddy in the eternal whirl.  Public spirit is out of the question.  A laxity of principle, without which no public man can be eminent or even safe, becomes too common to be scandalous; and the whole nation looks coolly on instances of apostasy which would startle the foulest turncoat of more settled times.