the situation. Yet his plan of Government rendered it necessary that he himself should skulk behind a screen of falsehood and chicanery, and that his personality should be merged in a puppet-show. He wished well to England, yet he degraded her in the eyes of every nation of Europe, and set a stamp of ignominy on his foreign administration in the eyes of nearly every Englishman. Not a few important and valuable laws are connected with his reign, yet not one is in popular memory connected with his name and fame. We know from the personal character of his administration that he must have passively or willingly sanctioned their enactment, but he has succeeded by his system of dissimulation in preventing us from assigning with certainty any personal merits to him for any one of them. He affected to favour contradictory policies of many men in succession, so that his own position lost all distinctness; and if he escaped from the general discredit, he forfeited all claim to particular merits. He had clever ideas on public affairs, and a thorough insight into the lower motives, at least, of human action. He meant probably to pursue some policy of his own, but he ended as he began, with merely evading complicity in the policy of others. He had the ability to have set his stamp upon the age: he only succeeded in obliterating himself.

405

JAMES THE SECOND.

IT has been the misfortune of Roman Catholicism in England, that the only two Sovereigns since the Reformation who have openly identified themselves with its cause have been both singularly ill-qualified to inspire enthusiasm by their personal characteristics. Queen Mary, whatever may be her claims to respect in certain points of view, was unquestionably most unattractive in her demeanour; and James Stuart the Younger was personally as unromantic and uninteresting a martyr as any cause has ever boasted. In his brother Charles, unshackled personal government had appealed to the support and half-disarmed the prejudice of the nation by an almost unparalleled combination of geniality and consummate tact; but in the case of James, even those most disposed to enlist themselves under the banner which he displayed, found their continued adherence to him a rather severe strain on their feelings of devoted loyalty. And even now it is difficult to peruse the records of his unfortunate career without experiencing a much stronger feeling of distaste, not to say repug

nance, than is warranted by the actual offences and real disposition of James himself. Certainly in him error and vice lost all the grace which sometimes is held to be their palliation, if not their condonation; and his reputation remains stripped of all adventitious appeals for sympathy, except such as may spring from the merciful consideration and pity due to one who ended his days in exile and comparative obscurity. Any description of the character of such a man, apart from a narrative of events, cannot be very interesting; for any interest belonging to the period attaches itself to the events themselves, not to the man who was in turn their principal agent and their victim.

James Stuart affords in his career a remarkable example of a man of limited capacity and shallow moral nature, tempted by the mistaken estimate formed of him by others, as well as by his own undoubting self-esteem, to attempt the roles of a statesman and an apostle. There was by nature just enough ability in him to have made him a respectable man of business, if circumstances had not called him to any important career; and he had just enough good principles to have made him a fairly conscientious and generally well-meaning, if not highly moral individual, if circumstances had not exposed him to any great temptations. He had a clear head for small things, with good sense in their appreciation, and when he chose had considerable powers of application to business. He was by nature obstinate, but rather

from slowness, in apprehending anything which was alien to his preconceived ideas than from any actual persistency in his nature; for he was also very impressionable when some chord of his nature was touched, or when the argument was brought within the range of his mental perceptions; and when thus affected, he was apt to take sudden resolutions in entirely opposite directions to his former line of action. He was really much influenced and led by those who could lay hold of his characteristic peculiarities, but he never willingly did anything which he did not believe to have proceeded from himself alone, and to have been dictated by his own unassisted judgment. He had the greatest desire to master the situation, and the most firm belief that he was capable of so doing. The Duke of Buckingham, according to Bishop Burnet, said of the two Royal brothers, that Charles II. 'could see things if he would,' and James' would see things if he could.' He was a man who was injured morally and intellectually almost equally by prosperity and adversity. By the former his ambition was raised, his estimate of his own abilities was enormously exaggerated, his confidence of success became unbounded; good sense and prudence alike deserted him, his temper became rough and arrogant, his disposition fierce and unfeeling, and his whole nature was hardened. On the other hand, adversity or an unexpected overthrow of his confident anticipations depressed his intellect

below its natural standard, crushed his personal dignity, and injuriously affected his moral integrity. And his whole career had been one of extreme vicissitudes of good and ill fortune. When too young to be much influenced in the formation of his character by external events, he had been exposed, like his elder brother, to the perils and calamities of civil war, had been a sort of State prisoner in the hands of the victorious Parliament,-had escaped to the Continent while still a lad, and had there been subjected alike to the evils of exile, and the allurements or persecutions of his mother's religious proselytism. The obstinate elements of his nature seem to have been roused by these attempts to force him, against his own free-will, into the fold of Rome, and he resisted all overt attempts with a seeming pertinacity of Protestant conviction. He served both under Turenne and Condé with some distinction, giving evidence of aptitudes for the duties of an officer, which induced Turenne, it is said, to entertain expectations of his military capacity which were never in any way realised in succeeding years. This was one of the first instances of his really limited abilities misleading spectators into the idea that he was designed for great things. In fact, his brother's fate was exactly reversed in his case. Charles was a clever man, who was depreciated through his own wilful self-effacement. James was a man of inferior talents, who was overrated, and