to explain the difference between Ship-money and the Habeas Corpus Act.  It may be added that, as in religion, so in politics, few even of those who are enlightened enough to comprehend the meaning latent under the emblems of their faith can resist the contagion of the popular superstition.  Often, when they flatter themselves that they are merely feigning a compliance with the prejudices of the vulgar, they are themselves under the influence of those very prejudices.  It probably was not altogether on grounds of expediency that Socrates taught his followers to honour the gods whom the state honoured, and bequeathed a cock to Esculapius with his dying breath.  So there is often a portion of willing credulity and enthusiasm in the veneration which the most discerning men pay to their political idols.  From the very nature of man it must be so.  The faculty by which we inseparably associate ideas which have often been presented to us in conjunction is not under the absolute control of the will.  It may be quickened into morbid activity.  It may be reasoned into sluggishness.  But in a certain degree it will always exist.  The almost absolute mastery which Mr. Hallam has obtained over feelings of this class is perfectly astonishing to us, and will, we believe, be not only astonishing but offensive to many of his readers.  It must particularly disgust those people who, in their speculations on politics, are not reasoners but fanciers; whose opinions, even when sincere, are not produced, according to the ordinary law of intellectual births, by induction or inference, but are equivocally generated by the heat of fervid tempers out of the overflowing of tumid imaginations.  A man of this class is always in extremes.  He cannot be a friend to liberty without calling for a community of goods, or a friend to order without taking under his protection the foulest excesses of tyranny.  His admiration oscillates between the most worthless of rebels and the most worthless of oppressors, between Marten, the disgrace of the High Court of justice, and Laud, the disgrace of the Star-Chamber.  He can forgive anything but temperance and impartiality.  He has a certain sympathy with the violence of his opponents, as well as with that of his associates.  In every furious partisan he sees either his present self or his former self, the pensioner that is, or the Jacobin that has been.  But he is unable to comprehend a writer who, steadily attached to principles, is indifferent about names and badges, and who judges of characters with equable severity, not altogether untinctured with cynicism, but free from the slightest touch of passion, party spirit, or caprice.

We should probably like Mr. Hallam’s book more if, instead of pointing out with strict fidelity the bright points and the dark spots of both parties, he had exerted himself to whitewash the one and to blacken the other.  But we should certainly prize it far less.  Eulogy and invective may be had for the asking.  But for cold rigid justice, the one weight and the one measure, we know not where else we can look.