THE IFS OF HISTORY, pp. 3-6, omitted to be acknowledged,— HISTORIC NINEPINS. The General Subject. CHANCES OF HISTORY. ATIONS will more readily part with the essentials than with the forms of liberty; and Napoleon might have died an emperor in reality, if he had been contented to have lived a consul in name. Had Cromwell displayed his hankerings for royalty somewhat sooner than he did, it is probable that he would have survived his power. Mr. Pitt gained a supremacy in this country, which none of his predecessors dared to hope, and which none of his successors will, we trust, attempt to attain. For twenty years he was "de facto," not "de jure," a king. But he was wise in his generation, and took care to confine the swelling stream of his ambition to channels that were constitutional; and with respect to the impurity, the filth, and the corruption of those channels, he trusted to the vast means he possessed of alarming the weak, blinding the acute, bribing the mercenary, and intimidating the bold: confiding his own individual security, to that selfishness inherent in our nature, which dictates to the most efficient mind, to have too much respect for itself to become a Catiline, and too little esteem for others to become a Cato. There was a short period in the Roman history, when that nation enjoyed as much liberty as is compatible with the infirmities of humanity. Their neighbours the Athenians, had much of the form, but little of the substance, of freedom; disputers about this rich inheritance rather than enjoyers of it, the Athenians treated liberty, as schismatics religion, where the true benefits of both have been respectively lost to each by their rancorous contentions about them. 70 GREAT RULERS IN HISTORY. Lord Macaulay, in his admirable paper on the great Lord Clive, has the following remarks upon the rules for judging the conduct of eminent rulers :-"Ordinary criminal justice knows nothing of set-off. The greatest desert cannot be pleaded in answer to a charge of the slightest transgression. If a man has sold beer on Sunday morning, it is no defence that he has saved the life of a fellow-creature at the risk of his own. If he has harnessed a Newfoundland dog to his little child's carriage, it is no defence that he was wounded at Waterloo. But it is not in this way that we ought to deal with men who, raised far above ordinary B 2 CHARACTERS OF KINGS. restraints, and tried by far more than ordinary temptations, are entitled to a more than ordinary measure of indulgence. Such men should be judged by their contemporaries as they will be judged by posterity. Their bad actions ought not, indeed, to be called good; but their good and bad actions ought to be fairly weighed; and if, on the whole, the good preponderate, the sentence ought to be one, not merely of acquittal, but of approbation. Not a single great ruler in history can be absolved by a judge who fixes his eye inexorably on one or two unjustifiable acts. Bruce, the deliverer of Scotland; Maurice, the deliverer of Germany; William, the deliverer of Holland; his great descendant, the deliverer of England; Murray, the good Regent; Cosmo, the father of his country; Henry the Fourth of France; Peter the Great of Russia-how would the best of them pass such a scrutiny? History takes wider views; and the best tribunal for great political cases is the tribunal which anticipates the verdict of history." CHARACTERS OF KINGS. Horace Walpole writes to Sir Horace Mann, in 1764:-"Count Poniatowski, with whom I was acquainted when he was here, is King of Poland, and calls himself Stanislaus the Second. This is the sole in stance, I believe, upon record, of a second of a name being on the throne while the first was living, without having contributed to dethrone him. Old Stanislaus lives to see a line of successors, like Macbeth in the cave of the witches. So much for Poland! Don't let us go farther north; we shall find there Alecto herself. I have almost wept for poor Ivan. [The deposed Czar Ivan, attempting to make his escape, had been murdered; but it is very doubtful whether the Czarina could be privy to his death.] I shall soon begin to believe that Richard III. murdered as many folks as the Lancastrians say he did. I expect that this Fury will poison her son next, lest Semiramis should have the bloody honour of having been more unnatural. As Voltaire has poisoned so many persons of former ages, methinks he ought to do as much for the present time, and assure posterity that there never was such a lamb as Catherine the Second, and that, so far from assassinating her own husband and Czar Ivan, she wept over every chicken that she had for dinner. How crimes, like fashions, flit from clime to clime! Murder reigns under the State, while you, who are in the very town where Catherine de' Medici was born, and within a stone's-throw of Rome, where Borgia and his holy father sent cardinals to the other world by hecatombs, are surprised to hear that there is such an instrument as a stiletto. "I have no more monarchs to chat over; all the rest are the most Catholic or most Christian, or most something or other that is divine ; and you know one can never talk long about folks that are only excellent. One can say no more about Stanislaus the First than that he is the best of beings. I mean, unless they do not deserve it, and then their flatterers can hold forth upon their virtues by the hour." THE "IFS" OF HISTORY. 3 THE MORAL OF MONARCHY. "A man may read a sermon," says Jeremy Taylor, "the best and most passionate that ever man preached, if he shall but enter into the sepulchres of kings. In the same Escurial where the Spanish princes live in greatness and power, and decree war or peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery where their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall be no more: and where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grandsire's head to take his crown. There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change, from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men. There is enough to cool the flames of lust, to abate the height of pride, to appease the itch of covetous desires, to sully and dash out the dissembling colours of a lustful, artificial, and imaginary beauty. There the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and the despised princes mingle their dust, and lay down their symbol of mortality, and tell all the world, that when we die our ashes shall be equal to kings, and our accounts shall be easier, and our pains for our crimes shall be less. To my apprehension, it is a sad record which is left by Athenæus, concerning Ninus, the great Assyrian monarch, whose life and death is summed up in these words: Ninus, the Assyrian, had an ocean of gold, and other riches more than the sand in the Caspian Sea; he never saw the stars, and perhaps he never desired it; he never stirred up the holy fire among the Magi, nor touched his God with the sacred rod, according to the laws; he never offered sacrifice, nor worshipped the Deity, nor administered justice, nor spake to the people, nor numbered them; but he was most valiant to eat and drink, and having mingled his wines, he threw the rest upon the stones. This man is dead: behold his sepulchre, and now hear where Ninus is. Sometime I was Ninus, and drew the breath of a living man, but now am nothing but clay. I have nothing but what I did eat, and what I served to myself in lust is all my portion : the wealth with which I was blest, my enemies meeting together shall carry away, as the mad Thyades carry a raw goat. I am gone to Hell; and when I went thither, I carried neither gold nor horses, nor a silver chariot. I that wore a mitre, am now a little heap of dust!” THE "IFS" OF HISTORY. If something had happened which didn't happen, what would have happened afterwards? is a kind of speculation which is now much in fashion. Of course, no one can answer positively the above inquiry. Yet, in looking back upon the course of history, it is impossible not to dwell for a moment upon some of the more important crises, and to remark how small a difference might have made an incalculable change. We know the usual sayings about the decisive battles of the world. If Themistocles had lost the battle of Salamis, if Asdrubal had won the battle of the Metaurus, if Charles Martel had been beaten by the |