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BURTON'S REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE.'

HERE is no one who has done harder or better work in conHe is now

THERE is no one

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a veteran, and his achievements are conspicuous in many a field. He has earned distinction as a writer on political and social economy, as a biographer, and an essayist. His Life of David Hume, published in 1846, is the only complete and satisfactory account of our great philosopher. Professor Huxley in his recent monograph is content to 'draw freely from it the materials of his own biographical sketch. It might have been more condensed and picturesque in its general outline, but few books serve better the chief object of all biography, to give a lifelike picture of the man and his time, and the circumstances attending the growth of his thought, rather than any analysis or estimate of the thought itself, which is the business of philosophical criticism rather than of biography. We hardly know more charming books of their kind than Mr. Burton's Scot Abroad' and 'The Book Hunter,' replete with interest and vitality of detail, with a solid heart of fact and meaning, unlike so many modern essays, whose liveliness is all upon the surface.

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But it is in the higher department of history that Dr. Burton has won his chief laurels. All his other works are more or less studies with a view to the historical labours which have been the ripe fruit of his earnest and hard-working literary career. His first distinct historical publication was a 'History of Scotland from the Revolution to the Extinction of the last Jacobite Insurrection (1689-1748)'-long a comparatively unknown period of Scottish history, without the picturesque attractiveness of its preceding ages of military and religious conflict, or the sober brilliancy of its later age of industrial development and literary glory; an unheroic time, standing between the wild turbulence of the seventeenth century and the solid progress which marks the latter half of the eighteenth century. But while unheroic, it was highly significant in the establishment of those principles of government both in Church and State, the final settlement of international relations with England and the equality of commercial intercourse with it, out of which the social life and prosperity of modern Scotland has grown. The careful study of this age of transition is necessary, both to the understanding of the preceding contests which divided and devastated Scotland from the time of the Reformation, and of the new developments both of political and religious excitement which have since characterised its history. And nowhere will the student find a safer or more intelligent guide in the study of the time than in Dr. Burton's volumes. His grasp of constitutional principles, his judicial impartiality, and his breadth of sympathy

does Thucydides appeal to memory and hearsay? Why is there no mention of books' up to a certain date, and then a common mention of them? I have looked through all the extant Greek plays, tragedies and comedies, and their numerous extant fragments, with a special view to this question, which I have had before me for years. It is not till nearly B.C. 400,- that is, two centuries later than the date assigned by Mr. Grote, that I find any mention of books, or writing-masters (grammatistae), or booksellers.36 And as Thucydides never once quotes Herodotus, or Plato Thucydides-though he does once refer (Sympos. p. 178. C.) to Acusilaus-the paucity of written books (if they existed at all except as the private property of the authors) must be inferred, and the supposed MSS. of the Iliad and Odyssey before the age of Solon must be relegated to the category of the barest possibilities.

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The close connection of the word Bißiov or Bußiov with the name of the papyrus-plant, byblus, may be thought to prove that its use as a writing-material must have been early known to the Greeks. Papyrus' (says Dr. Hayman, already quoted) must have been cheap and plentiful in Greece and Sicily.' Pliny however says that papyrus was not used (he must mean, by the Greeks) for paper before the time of Alexander the Great. The use of it in Egypt for hieratic writing may have been so far a secret, that the method of preparing it remained for a long time unknown to the Greeks. At all events, we cannot show that they ever employed it in early times for any documentary purposes. It may have been too brittle, or suited only to a very dry climate; we are on a subject on which we have no evidence at all, and therefore conjectures in one direction are as permissible as on the other.37

One point in this controversy is undeniable; that the dέTos (which probably consisted of two or three thin plates of wood) was used for ordinary written messages or communications long before 'books,' properly so called, came into use. Euripides 38 calls a δέλτος ‘a fir tablet, πεύκη, and it probably differed only from the Tívaş, tabula, in being smaller and more suited for transmission when tied up and sealed. There is nothing however in the use of these implements to suggest to our minds the notion of a reading or literary class who had libraries or collections of books at their command. I am myself of opinion that nothing deserving the name of a library was known to the Greeks till the era of the great Alexandrine School under the Ptolemies, and I have no belief in an oft-told story, that Peisistratus collected a library for the Athenians.

F. A. PALEY.

36 A few faint indications of being taught to read occur a little earlier, as when the sausage-seller in the Knights of Aristophanes (Cavaliers' would be a better rendering of the title) says he knows his letters very little, and that little very badly.

The word xáprns, charta, occurs in one passage of Plato Comicus, circ. B.C. 425.

BURTON'S 'REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE."

HERE is no one who has done harder or better work in con

a veteran, and his achievements are conspicuous in many a field. He has earned distinction as a writer on political and social economy, as a biographer, and an essayist. His Life of David Hume, published in 1846, is the only complete and satisfactory account of our great philosopher. Professor Huxley in his recent monograph is content to 'draw freely' from it the materials of his own biographical sketch. It might have been more condensed and picturesque in its general outline, but few books serve better the chief object of all biography, to give a lifelike picture of the man and his time, and the circumstances attending the growth of his thought, rather than any analysis or estimate of the thought itself, which is the business of philosophical criticism rather than of biography. We hardly know more charming books of their kind than Mr. Burton's Scot Abroad' and 'The Book Hunter,' replete with interest and vitality of detail, with a solid heart of fact and meaning, unlike so many modern essays, whose liveliness is all upon the surface.

But it is in the higher department of history that Dr. Burton has won his chief laurels. All his other works are more or less studies with a view to the historical labours which have been the ripe fruit of his earnest and hard-working literary career. His first distinct historical publication was a 'History of Scotland from the Revolution to the Extinction of the last Jacobite Insurrection (1689-1748)'-long a comparatively unknown period of Scottish history, without the picturesque attractiveness of its preceding ages of military and religious conflict, or the sober brilliancy of its later age of industrial development and literary glory; an unheroic time, standing between the wild turbulence of the seventeenth century and the solid progress which marks the latter half of the eighteenth century. But while unheroic, it was highly significant in the establishment of those principles of government both in Church and State, the final settlement of international relations with England and the equality of commercial intercourse with it, out of which the social life and prosperity of modern Scotland has grown. The careful study of this age of transition is necessary, both to the understanding of the preceding contests which divided and devastated Scotland from the time of the Reformation, and of the new developments both of political and religious excitement which have since characterised its history. And nowhere will the student find a safer or more intelligent guide in the study of the time than in Dr. Burton's volumes. His grasp of constitutional principles, his judicial impartiality, and his breadth of sympathy

and intelligence all find a special field for their exercise in this task, and there is no part of his historical labours which we are inclined to estimate more highly than the two volumes which preceded the appearance of his general History of Scotland from the Earliest Period to the Revolution of 1868.'

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Of this general history, Dr. Burton's magnum opus, it is unnecessary to say anything here. It has been already judged, and placed by almost universal verdict at the head of modern histories of Scotland. Its only rival in completeness and extent is that of Tytler; and while the latter may have some advantages of style, and a lighter and more graceful touch here and there, there are few who would hesitate to assign the palm to Burton's volumes in all the deeper qualities of insight, comprehension, and impartiality of handling. The earlier volumes may leave a good deal to be desired, both in thoroughness of research and picturesqueness of treatment. labours of McSkene and other Celtic scholars have brought new and The more discerning contributions to the study of early Scottish nationality, and supplied a certain lack of tenderness and reverence in dealing with its primeval legends, ecclesiastical and civil, which some miss in the rougher and more sceptical handling of Mr. Burton; but no one has equalled him in the higher qualities of political knowledge and penetration into the real character of the forces moving Scottish nationality from first to last. masterly in his treatment of the conflicts of the sixteenth and sevenHe is especially enlightened, candid, and teenth centuries, and the great names concerned in them, around which there have gathered so many prejudices and mistaken passions. Free from the exaggeration of the partisan writers who on one side and the other have described the Scottish Reformation and the part played by the two picturesque characters arrayed in opposition-Mary Queen of Scots and John Knox-he has rendered justice to both, and to the event itself. Nowhere has a truer picture of Queen Mary, her conduct and motives, been given than in Mr. Burton's fourth volume. And with equal fidelity he has tried to hold the balance fairly in the later contests of the seventeenth century, incarnated in such partisans as Argyle and Montrose. Fairness of this kind is unhappily among the rarest merits of even great historians: and yet without it what is history, even in the cleverest hands, but a series of partisan pamphlets teaching neither philosophy nor truth of any kind by example? It is Dr. Burton's distinction to have presented a picture of Scottish national life, from its beginning to 1745-when this life assumes its latest modern development, still awaiting its historianwhich for fulness, impartiality, strong intelligence, and graphic yet sober narrative is unequalled.

In the volumes now before us, and which probably will close his arduous labours, our author returns so far to his original field of historical study. It is no longer, however, the history of his own country in the beginning of the eighteenth century, but the comparatively broad and open field of both English and Scottish

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history in the reign of Queen Anne which he has here written. Lord Stanhope's volume, published ten years ago, traversed the same field; but there is little resemblance between the succinct, neat, and lucid story of his lordship, and the more ample, more fully informed, and, so to speak, more philosophical, if less clearly connected and less happily written, narrative of Dr. Burton. general reader will be apt to turn by preference to the former; and the careful literary student is still forced to note here and there, as in the former work, a roughness and confusion of style-an annoying habit of suggesting trains of thought or allusion which are never quite finished, but lie like half-opened quarries across his pages. There is also throughout a lack of unity, of vivid and coherent arrangement of the subject, so that the reader has difficulty, even after repeated perusal, in gathering the whole in a clearly intelligible picture before his mind. But there is everywhere the same breadth of manly sense and insight into political principles, the same noble impartiality and discrimination, the same penetration into the real meaning both of incident and character, the entanglements of the one and the complications of the other. He judges keenly yet fairly competing interests and parties, statesmen, soldiers, courtiers, and sects, and without a touch of fanaticism himself, political or religious, he is especially able to paint with a brusque and satiric impressiveness the fanaticisms and corruptions which still lingered on the stage of English history. In one respect alone has Dr. Burton entirely failed in giving us any worthy picture of the time. His concluding chapter on Intellectual Progress' is both inadequately conceived and unhappily executed. No one could gather from it what a terrible force, political as well as literary, Swift was in the last years of Anne; and no one can think the extracts which he has unearthed from Tom Brown' and 'Ned Ward' any compensation for a sketch of the social and literary life of what has been called our Augustan age.' It may be a discourtesy to suppose that any reader requires to be informed about the writings of Pope, Addison, Arbuthnot and Steele, although we fear many modern readers could hardly repel with honesty the discourtesy; but this cannot be held as an excuse for not sketching one of the most interesting aspects of the reign to whose illustration his volumes are devoted.

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In his two opening chapters Dr. Burton groups well in front the chief characters and parties of the period, from the Queen herself to the Quakers and Remnants' of the Westminster Assembly. The portrait of the Queen is but vaguely touched, it is only in the course of the narrative that it comes forth in detail; but her position, the significance of her accession to the throne after the brief reign of William III. by himself, her half-imbecile husband, and her misfortunes in the loss of her numerous children, are all well sketched. Queen Anne, like Queen Elizabeth, was only of semi-royal blood. Her mother was Anne Hyde, the daughter of one who was no doubt an illustrious statesman, but whose birth was in the rank of the

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