humble but useful functions of securing and transmitting property from individual to individual. The little instrument by which the modern conveyancer secures 201. a-year to Mary Higgins and her children is, in truth, the lever by which a king might have been prized from his throne; which was applied with consummate craft to the destruction of the banded power of the aristocracy of the huge and gloomy fabric of ecclesiastical domination. Thus the water which might at first have been seen forming part of the magnificent confluence of Niagara, and then precipitated, amid clouds of mist and foam, down its tremendous falls, after passing over great tracts of country, through innumerable channels and rivulets, serves, at length, quietly to turn the peasants' mill.'-p. 176.

Mr. Warren might find it difficult to bring historical authority for every assertion in this passage-but it contains a general truth brilliantly and powerfully stated; and we leave him with the expression of our sincere hope that the duties of his profession may not be found incompatible with the future exertion of his literary talents-which certainly was not the case in the best days of our law and our literature.

Von Friedrich

von

ART. X.-1. England im jahre 1835. Raumer. Leipsig. 1836. 2. England in 1835: being a Series of Letters written to Friends in Germany, during a Residence in London, and Excursions into the Provinces. By Frederick von Raumer, Professor of History at the University of Berlin; Author of the History of the Hohenstauffen;' of the History of Europe from the End of the 15th Century;' of Illustrations of the History of the 16th and 17th Centuries,' &c. Translated from the German by Sarah Austin and H. E. Lloyd. London. John Murray. 3 vols.

12mo. 1836.

WE

6

E believe this was the first English journal that took any notice of Professor Raumer's merits as an industrious explorer of antiquarian documents; but, thankful as we had been to him for his services in that department, we did not expect much from the announcement of the present more ambitious undertaking. We have read in the Apologue that there was, once upon a time, a family of owlets who fancied themselves eagles-Mr. Raumer's readers will be convinced that this breed is not extinct. The humble diligence which loves to grope about in the obscurity of registers and records is seldom equal to the broader daylight and higher views of existing society. Tom Hearne, we suspect, would have given but a bungling portraiture of the court of France, if he had happened to fall into that terra incognita; and we should have been à priori very much surprised if the

compiler

compiler of certain 'Letters illustrative of the 16th and 17th Centuries' (compared with whom Hearne is an intellectual giant) should have given us even a tolerable sketch of the existing manners and politics of England. But we confess we were not prepared for so extraordinary a failure as that which it now becomes our duty to expose. This work contrives, by a singular but unlucky ingenuity, to combine the most heterogeneous defects: it is vapid though vague-hasty and heavy-purblind yet presumptuous. Ninetenths of it are composed of extracts from the commonest publications, so garbled as to be scarcely recognizable, and of statistical accounts so mistaken and mangled as to become laughable. The book is a mass of bold trivialities-solemn inaccuracies-unconscious contradictions-where, in one word, everything is commonplace, and yet nothing is true.

But this is not the worst-the mere blunders of a foreign antiquarian would be natural and venial-but we are sorry to say, Professor Raumer has made his work throughout a party, and in some instances, a personal libel on the Conservatives of England. Hence the phenomenon which we have lately witnessed of the ministerial leader in the House of Commons quoting against the House of Lords the calumnies of this Berlin doctor. We think, before we have done with this subject, we shall give Lord John Russell some reason to regret his indiscreet and indecorous quotation.

6

It may be asked what should have biassed the mind of such a gentleman? Why should this painful decypherer of old parchments have adopted the prejudices of one of our parties rather than the other? What, in short, but truth and reason could have influenced a spectator so indifferent in point of interest and so independent by his neutral position? We might answer, in the first place, that impartiality loses all its authority when it happens to be combined with entire ignorance of the questions to be decided; and secondly, that the Germans,' as Colonel Napier says, plodding even to a proverb, possess the most extravagant imaginations on the face of the earth,' so that it is just as natural for a German system-monger to go wrong, as it is for any other man to go right;-but we have some additional and more individual reasons to suggest for Mr. Raumer's bias. Prefixed to Mrs. Austin's translation is a memoir of the Professor, extracted from a German biographical dictionary, and written in a style of high-flown panegyric. This cloge gives a very confused (and as far as we can understand it) inconsistent account of Mr. Raumer's life and principles; but through the obscurity of some passages, we think we discover that his politics had been, long before his visit to England, censured both for violence and inconsistency.

The part he has taken in politics has given rise to many miscon structions,

structions, as must happen when party rage can see only party opinions. Raumer is a truly free man, who opposes absolutism in every shape; but most strenuously when it assumes that of the despotism of exclusive political creeds, given out as the only means of political salvation. As the absolute principle in government changed with the disturbed times and the agitations of his country, his opposition changed likewise. He has remained perfectly steadfast and consistent; but the objects of his opposition have altered with time.'pp. xxiv, xxv.

And again:

'When the idea of legitimacy degenerated from a useful fiction into an idolatry destructive of all intellectual life and progress; when, amid the incense offered at the foot of the throne and the altar, the spirit of feudal aristocracy began to rise from its long slumber, Raumer's sound and acute understanding immediately perceived whence the greatest danger was likely to arise. . . . . His voice was raised alone. His former fellow-labourers were grown old, or spiritless, or were elevated to posts in which they found it convenient to be silent. Raumer's name was now hailed with acclamation by the liberals; they extolled him to the skies, and exulted in the accession to their party of a man who was as far from sharing in their dreams of freedom, as in the short-sighted obstinacy which had driven him (apparently, and for a moment) into their ranks.'-pp. xxvi, xxvii.

From all this we conclude that Raumer was once an ultraliberal, but that being now-like those fellow-labourers' referred to in the extract-elevated to a post (Professor of Political Science in the University of Berlin) in which he finds it convenient to be silent on questions of domestic government, he endeavours to cloak his own conversion on the subject of Prussian politics, by affecting a great zeal for religious liberty (a point on which that drumhead government has always retained the indifference of the great Frederick), and by throwing himself heels-overhead into the muddy overflow of English Reform. This hypothesis is at least consistent with the few facts stated in the memoir; and accords with the whole form and spirit of his new work, which affords in every second page the strange and at first sight unaccountable inconsistency, of advocating revolutionary reform in England and military despotism in Prussia; but there is another, and, we fancy, still more weighty, because more personal bias on Mr. Raumer's opinions. His journey to England was, ostensibly at least, for the purpose of searching our Museum-as he had already done the Royal Library at Paris-for historical documents; and it is not surprising that he should have brought with him such letters of recommendation as might be necessary to obtain permission to that effect: but he took such superabundant care in this respect, that he was provided, he says in one place, with one hundred and twelve letters of introduction, and we think

he

We

he mentions a subsequent supply. It seems that the greater, or at least the most effective portion of these letters happened, as was probably natural from the tendency of Raumer's own principles, to be addressed to persons professing liberal politics-and the only person in London with whom he appears to have had much previous acquaintance, happened to be the clever Whig lady who has. subsequently translated his effusions-so that, naturally enough, he was at once elected, as it were, and initiated into the society and views of that party. Besides, it is notorious that the great Whig houses are more frequently opened for the purpose of proselytism than those of the Tories, who are in general too proud, too delicate-or-as some may be inclined to say-too shortsighted, to beat up for political recruits in this manner. might make some not unimportant observations on the effect that this difference in the habits of the two great parties produces amongst foreigners-and of course throughout Europebut we have not leisure at present for such a digression: suffice it to say, that the general fact is so, and that Mr. Raumer's case was no exception: for, although he was by accident admitted to two or three Tory houses of eminence in the political and fashionable world, his habitual society, high as well as low, evidently was amongst Whigs. It must be admitted, that if by this reserve the Tories occasionally lose the acquaintance of agreeable and respectable foreigners, they, on the other hand, escape the annoyance of being exposed to the disagreeable criticisms, or still more disagreeable praises of travelling book-makers, and we suspect that those who were so unlucky as to admit the acquaintance of such persons as Prince Puckler Muskau, or Mr. N. P. Willis-now rather regret their hospitality. It is, however, but justice to Mr. Raumer to say that he is much less offensive than the writers we have named. He himself professes great horror at the practice of publishing private anecdotes of the society into which one is admitted, and is very indignant with Prince Puckler's calumnious caricatures-(especially, no doubt, that of the Duke of Devonshire)-but he does, nevertheless, occasionally fall into the same kind, though not the same degree of error, and in other instances (even when he violates no hospitality) he makes remarks on individuals which are inconsistent often with taste, and sometimes, though we do not impute any wilful falsification, with truth but his trespasses in this way are of little importance, and we only thus slightly notice them, because he seems to be under the mistake of supposing that he has eschewed them altogether.

His friend and admirer, Mrs. Austin, seems to have been very zealous and very successful in bringing Mr. Raumer into the best Whig circles; for we find that the second night after his arrival in London,

'When

'When he was drest all in his best

To walk abroad with Sally,'

she introduced him at Devonshire House. Mr. Raumer tells us that another of his friends afterwards informed him that to have been invited to Devonshire House was a high distinction.' We rather wonder at the want of sense as well as gallantry which the Professor shows by recording this so solemnly. The compliment, whatever might be its worth, he owed entirely to Mrs. Austin, and we should have thought a gentleman who affects such overweening devotion to the ladies would have felt that she had paid him a much higher one by admitting him to her personal confidence and domestic circle, than by leading him to stare about a fine house, among a crowd of five hundred strangers, however fine. We cannot complain that Mrs. Austin should have introduced her Berlin lion (such a lion as Shakspeare's Snug the Joiner) to her Whig acquaintance-' non equidem invideo, miror magis’– or that she communicated to him her own Whig opinions-this clique of people are naturally propagandists; but what we do complain of is, that Raumer retails the ex parte statements which he picks up in this society-the cavils of this coterie, the prejudices of his prompter, as if they were the natural and spontaneous results of his own impartial inquiry and observation. If he had told us honestly and truly that he knew nothing of what he was writing about; that he was supremely ignorant of the language, manners, and political state of England; but that he had, by a diligent cultivation of Whig society, obtained such and such information, and heard such and such arguments, and had arrived at such and such opinions, the public in Germany and here would have known what to trust to, and would have listened, with a due appreciation of its value, to the prating of the parrot. A man of not strong faculties, and very strong self-conceit, may have easily been led to overrate his own qualifications for observing, and been in a great measure unconscious of the tricks played off upon and through him: but the result is a real fraud on the public—and the kind of importance which has been attached to his book is derived from this species of imposition. In short, when we find Lord John Russell quoting, and Mr. Spring Rice coun tenancing, certain dogmas of this intelligent and unprejudiced foreigner,' we must recollect that the topics they thus eulogize had been previously infused by themselves and their followers into this German machine, which really does no more than spout them out again. The Professor, in one of the most ludicrous pages of his book (vol. i. p. 11.), says exultingly

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There have been hours in which I have been Alexander the Great, and Charles V., and William of Orange, and a Hohenstauffen Emperor and Pope! There have been moments when, like Melusine, I was

transformed