be reversed; governments may or may not be slow in following it; but, with or without their assent, it will grow into a fixed rule. Mr. F. C. Beers, with a twilight sense of propriety, put on his Orange ribbon as he entered Tollymore Park, and removed it again on leaving it. But a man cannot divest himself of his feelings as quickly as of his ribbons. The action, however, was symbolical of a true principle, and impartial men will insist on its application. Mr. Beers thought that an Orange rosette ought not to be seen upon a magistrate's coat, they will think that an Orange magistrate ought not to be seen upon the Bench. The time selected for this Orange manifestation has been particularly infelicitous. The repeal party is broken up; and in other parts of Ireland party-spirit is dead. The four years' famine has compelled people to turn their thoughts from political agitation to social and economical questions; and there is an increasing feeling that the well-being of Ireland depends less upon the peculiar constitution of her government than upon the cultivation of her soil,-proper relations between landlord and tenant, the pure administration of justice, and that general tranquillity without which capital cannot accumulate. The Irish Roman Catholic party, however, no doubt remains: but it is now a party without any strong principle of coherence or present object. It is held together very much by the traditional feeling of exclusion from the pale of the British constitution, the unparalleled position of their church, and the singular circumstance of seven eighths of a nation having been ousted, in consequence of their religious belief, from the possession of the soil of their country. But though the land is held by the Protestants, the bulk of the personal property is in the hands of Roman Catholics; and one of the indirect effects of the famine will be to correct this unhealthy distribution. Under a pecuniary pressure, affecting directly the owners of the soil, estates will pass from them to the owners of personal property; and the two descriptions of property will be more equally divided between the religious parties. But when the tendency of the dispensations of Providence is thus to efface the line of demarcation in temporal matters between Roman Catholic and Protestant when a party forming seven eighths of the population of the island, and holding the greater part of the personal property, is on the point of acquiring their share of territorial possessions, with the political power arising out of them, how suicidal is the effort of the Orange party to affect a religious ascendency, to claim an almost exclusive right to power, while they show their unfitness to use it, -to place themselves in perpetual hostility to the overwhelming majority of their country - 1850. The Advice of Lord Stanley and Sir R. Peel. 117 men, to irritate them to the utmost, without weakening their strength, and to drive them to unite and to concentrate their political efforts upon one object, while by their own conduct they repel the support of all moderate people. Orangemen may, perhaps, despise the temperate language used by Lord John Russell in 1836, and may resent the settled policy of his government in 1849; but to neglect also the opinion of Lord Stanley and Sir Robert Peel, and act in opposition to the advice of the leaders of every party, can hardly be wise. Lord Stanley's advice to the North Lancashire Association applies with tenfold force to the Orange Association. Could the ingenuity of man suggest a source more certain 'to send forth bitter waters than the spirit which will be engendered by the establishment of your association? All 'the arguments of self-defence, all the reasoning by which, as 'from an overpowering necessity, you justify a deviation from 'the ordinary channels in which political feeling diffuses itself and evaporates, pass at once to the side of your opponents. They are those whom it is sought to oppress by combination— 'they are those who appeal to the sympathy of the country for 'the maintenance of freedom of conscience. Beware, for your ' own sakes, how you remove one cause of their weakness beware of forcing them, for the sake of resisting your aggres'sions, to forget their own differences-beware how you organise 'the whole country in such a manner that every man must become a partisan.' Sir R. Peel, in 1844, after expressing his earnest hope that agitation in Ireland, and all its evil consequences, might be permitted to subside, gave utterance to feelings which he shared in common with his political opponents, in the following language: I should consider that the happiest day of my life when I 'could see the beloved sovereign of these realms fulfilling the 'fondest wishes of her heart-I should hail the dawning of that auspicious day when she could alight, like some benignant 'spirit, on the shores of Ireland, and lay the foundations of a 'Temple of Peace! when she could, in accents which proceeded 'from the heart, spoken to the heart rather than to the ear, call upon her Irish subjects of all classes and of all denominations, Protestants and Roman Catholics, Saxon and Celt, to forget the difference of creed and of race, and to hallow that Temple of Peace which she should then found, with sacrifices still holier than those by which the temples of old were hallowed, by the sacrifice of those evil passions that dishonour our com'mon faith.' One part of the vision has been realised: the auspicious day arrived. Commanding the respect of her subjects by her virtues, and winning their love by her goodness, the Queen, surrounded by those family affections which so gracefully temper the majesty of her regal state, and which clinging round the throne as to their natural home, adorn and hallow it with the soft influences of domestic life, did set foot on the shores of Ireland. The gentle accents from her lips did breathe peace to the land, and amidst bursts of heartfelt acclamations from the Irish nation, the first stone of the Temple was laid. So far the statesman's prayer was granted,The rest,' alas! The rest the winds dispersed in empty air.' Can we say that the sovereign found a sacrifice of evil passions? A few short weeks before, there had indeed been officiating priests, and victims, and a sacrifice,-But the victims were the peasants of Dolly's Brae, and the smoke of the sacrifice rose from the cabins of Magheramayo. But we will not even now despond. To have allowed Lord Roden to have remained on the Bench would have been to sanction a denial of justice: in removing him the Government have fulfilled a plain duty and done their part. But here their power ceases. The fate of Ireland is in her own hands. The peaceful manner in which the fifth of November passed over, is a clear proof that the Orange leaders can secure tranquillity without additional laws, when they choose to exert that influence which they undoubtedly possess, although at times it suits their purposes to disclaim it. The conduct of parties in that country is narrowly watched by impartial men in this, whose sympathies are with the oppressed, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, and whose aid will be given to whichever party is most ready to sacrifice its evil passions, and unite in building the Temple of Peace-but will join heart and hand against those, who prefer the prosecution of their party feuds to the tranquillity of their common country. ART. IV. — History of Greece. By GEORGE GROTE, Esq. Vols. III. and IV. 1847. Vols. V. and VI. 1849. 8vo. IN N a former Number of this Journal (No. clxx.) we reviewed the two first volumes of this work; they were for the most part introductory, and only just entered the historical period. Mr. Grote has since completed a large portion of his undertaking, by the publication of four additional volumes; in which, 1850. Grote's History of Greece. 119 after relating what is known of the political origin of each Grecian state, he has described the Persian Wars, with the foundation of the Athenian Empire; and has brought down the historical narrative to the Peace of Nicias, which terminated the first act of the Peloponnesian War. We return to this work with a full consciousness of the importance and interest of the subject-as well as of the undiminished ability with which it has been treated by Mr. Grote. As the subject expands, and the drama developes itself, Mr. Grote has proved himself equal to the height of his great argument. He has shown that he can tell the true story of remote times, as well as discuss their mythological legends,—that he can set real men in motion, and paint the stirring life of the numerous Grecian communities, as well as analyse the patriotic and religious fictions which envelope the primitive ages of Hellas. Before we proceed to the examination of the volumes before us, we may be permitted to say that we have but small respect for that method which attempts to reduce history to a set of algebraic symbols; which accounts for all events by a law of necessary sequences; and suppressing, as far as it can, the names of individual men, and even of nations, deduces the progress of society from a set of metaphysical entities, such as Paganism, Catholicism, Feudality, Monarchy, Democracy, and the like. The history of each nation is always, in reality, specifically dif ferent from that of every other nation: And no general formula, or type, of successive states of society, following each other in a constant and invariable series, will suit Hindostan and Greece, Egypt and Germany. Nevertheless there is a certain broad current of universal history, to which the minor streams converge, and which represents the movement of the most advanced and civilised portion of mankind. At the head of this current, and as its highest, purest, and most copious source, stands the history of ancient Greece. The Religion of the civilised world, indeed, derives its ultimate origin from Judaism*; but with this exception, the beginnings of all our intellectual civilisation, of our poetry, music, history, oratory, sculpture, painting, and architecture; of our logical, metaphysical, ethical, *It ought not to be forgotten that Christianity, though not locally of Grecian origin, is inseparably connected with the Greek language; and that the earliest churches out of the Holy Land, were those in the Hellenised portions of Asia Minor and in Greece Proper. Besides which, the systematic development of Christian doctrine was exclusively due to Greeks, and to persons imbued with Grecian discipline. political, mathematical, and physical science, and of our free political institutions, must be traced to the Greeks. They are preeminently the intellectual aristocracy of the human race. No other nation can ever do for mankind what they did. They found the world immersed in all the darkness of the oriental form of society. Despotic governments, enforcing abject submission to the sovereign, and a prohibition of open discussion in assemblies of chiefs or counsellors ; exclusive priesthoods, predominating over the people; in private life, polygamy; cruel punishments and bodily mutilations; art massive, shapeless, and grotesque; the absence of all literature worthy of the name; no science, no oratory, no drama; no history, beyond a meagre chronicle of the genealogies and acts of the kings:-such was the state of the most civilised portion of mankind when the influence of the Greek genius began to operate upon the inert mass. It was this which first infused a soul into the lifeless body-it was the Greek Prometheus who stole from heaven the fire which illuminated and warmed these benighted races: and it was under its excitement that they made the first great step out of the stationary into the progressive state; that step, of which all experience proves the extreme difficulty, even when there is a model at hand, to work upon. Lagrange said that Newton was a fortunate man, for that there was only one system of the world to discover. We may in like manner say of the Greeks that they were a fortunate nation, for that the advance from oriental barbarism to occidental civilisation could only be once made. When the Greek preeminence had ceased, the Romans succeeded to the headship of civilisation. Their political and military achievements, and their systematic jurisprudence, together with Christianity, their subsequently adopted religion, give its character and colour to the civilisation of the world for many successive centuries. After the extinction of the Roman Empire, the only history which has any living importance in the modern world, and which has an interest beyond the knowledge of facts, appear to us to be that of England, and her colonies the United States of America. Every other civilised state has broken the link which might have connected it with the past. In the existing state of Europe its political institutions are not due to a native or spontaneous development; but are merely copied from the representative systems of England or America. At the utmost, one copy serves as a model for another; and the continental governments are never cited as independent examples: while the only foreign constitution which is ever held up to the imitation of England, is that peculiar form of its own colonial |