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coalitions, we cannot doubt that the Conservatives, if they honestly strive to purge the new Reform Bill of its democratic leaven, will meet with aid from many Liberals, who have no intention of abandoning their relations to the party to which they belong. The position occupied by the Conservatives in respect to this measure is one upon which many others who do not belong to their ranks will feel inclined to join them. They advocate no finality; they cling to no stationary policy in regard to the representation of the people. The Reform Act of 1832 is not an institution which they feel bound specially to defend. It has not grown with the growth of the people: it has not intertwined itself with any national memories, or become identified with the strength or greatness of the country. There can be no demur from the side of the Conservatives to any improvement upon it which experience may suggest, or the rise of new interests may demand. Only the change must be made in accordance with the old principles of the Constitution. It must be a development, and not a revolution. Since our history began, never has the arbitrament of clashing interests been entrusted to the supreme decision of the class who have no stake in the country save their labour. Any change that directly or indirectly will lead to that issue is, in its inevitable operation, a more tremendous revolution, a more violent departure from the first principles of our polity, than any through which England in her severest trials has passed; for in all of them property has retained its rights, and the fruits of free industry have been secure. That security would be imperilled as it has never been imperilled yet, if the Trades Unions were supreme. Such a supremacy would not only be without parallel in English history; it would be unexampled in the history of the world. Mr. Forster and some others are still fond of appealing to America as an illustration of the safety of the form of Government they recommend. Any one who looks upon the present condition of the United States as offering an enviable picture of what a well-ordered and united community should be like, has undoubtedly a right to claim the respect which is always accorded in this country to a muchenduring faith. Ordinary people, who are attached to the Habeas Corpus Act, and have no taste for civil war, will indulge in a hope that the institutions of this country may never attain to the peculiar species of success which has been granted to the institutions of the United States. But even their example, were it as admirable as Mr. Forster paints it, would be no encouragement. There are two points in which England cannot imitate them. We cannot copy either the wealth of their lower class, or the power of their Executive. An extended suffrage in England would not be any true reproduction of what Mr. Disraeli has

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well called the 'territorial democracy' of the United States. Nor, if it were, does our Parliamentary Government offer any analogy to the budding Cæsarism of the American Presidency. It is true that in America a suffrage all but universal dictates the policy of the nation. But it is a suffrage to which bounteous Nature affixes a qualification that cannot be imitated in old and densely-peopled countries: and the suffrage, so qualified, is only in effect exercised once in every four years. Our system is constructed to carry out in the policy of the Government the actual opinion at the moment of the million and a quarter of electors by whom the nation is ruled. It is a machine of the most exquisite delicacy. The conduction from the electors, who are the source of power, to the Ministers, is so perfect, that while Parliament is sitting they cannot govern for ten days in opposition to the public will. In America the state of things is very different. Once in four years universal suffrage utters its decree. But, that once given, it has as little control over the 'policy of the Government as the recruit who, of his own free will, has joined the army, has over the military power under which he has elected to serve. At this moment we are witnessing the spectacle of the elective President fighting upon a question of the most vital import, with the majority of Congress, and with the party that has just gained the majority at the polls: and as far as the contest has at present gone, there is good ground for believing that the President, armed with his vast patronage, will win. America during the last five years has only repeated to the world the lesson that had already been taught by France, that, if you will have democracy, you must have something like Cæsarism to control it. The feeble and pliable Executive of England is wholly unsuited to such an electoral body. A Government that yields and must yield to the slightest wish of the House of Commons, is only possible so long as that House of Commons is the organ of an educated minority. Such an instrument of Government has never yet in the history of the world been worked by a Legislature chosen by the lower class.

It is for those who love the Constitution to decide whether they will try to graft this foreign and uncongenial growth upon the old native stock. They are asked to set up a new thing in the political history of the world-a Government that shall be chosen by the class which lives on the proceeds of its daily labour, that shall conform to the wishes of that class and be obedient to its slightest impulse, and which yet shall guarantee the rights of property and of capital. And they are asked to perform this strange and wild experiment, not on some small community which might be ruined or effaced without materially affecting the sum of human happiness, but upon the greatest commercial

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and industrial empire in the world. It is an act of stupendous importance that they are about to execute. Be it for good or be it for evil, it can never be retraced. From the moment they have completed it, the class to which they belong is politically dead. The artisans to whom they transfer the supreme power over the vast and varied interests of this community may or may not tolerate that those who have summoned them to it shall continue to exercise a delegated influence; but the independent power which the educated classes, the aristocracy, the professional men, the merchants, the landowners, the manufacturers, have hitherto exerted, will be gone for ever. By unwearied canvassing or lavish expenditure they may beg or bribe back a semblance of it for a time; but even that shadow, so dearly purchased, of their former influence, they will retain on sufferance. They will hold all their dearest rights by favour. Their sole hope of escaping the whole burden of a taxation, artificially inflated to furnish employment for the working classtheir only chance of averting laws that will limit the free disposal of property, and will leave the employer helpless in the presence of those whom he employs-will lie in an unflagging and unfastidious courtiership of the new masters they have installed. And when this fate has come upon them, they will receive scant compassion either from the judgment of history or the opinion of their contemporaries; for it will record a tale little creditable to their sagacity or their courage. It will relate that it was in obedience to no overwhelming necessity that they bowed their necks beneath this grievous yoke. It will tell how these destructive projects had been raised before, and condemned by opinion-how they were revived to gratify the vanity of a pedantic busybody, whose historic name had been used in former days by abler men for their own purposes and how the traditions of a constitution, splendid with centuries of success and of glory, were heedlessly sacrificed by the credulity of partisans and by the apathy of a community rendered reckless by its own prosperity. It will be for the new Parliament, called to a discussion so strangely at variance with the purpose for which it was elected, to decide whether this reproach shall attach to it. The danger is great; the temper of the times does not rise to the height of this momentous controversy; and we can only hope that before the sacrifice is irrevocably made, the class that now holds political power may be roused to recognise in its true character the infatuation of the statesmen who ask them to give it up for ever.

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QUARTERLY REVIEW.

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ART. I.—Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds: with notices of some of his contemporaries. Commenced by Charles Robert Leslie, R.A.; continued and concluded by Tom Taylor. In 2 volumes. With portraits and illustrations. London: 1865. HE first authentic life of Reynolds was published in a quarto pamphlet in 1797, and was prefixed the next year to an octavo edition of his literary works. The brief narrative was by his friend and executor, Malone; who, notwithstanding his intimate knowledge of the man has only produced a dull and feeble sketch. Northcote next took the subject in hand. His life of Reynolds appeared in 1813, and a second and enlarged edition in 1819. 'I like it,' said Rogers the poet, it may be depended upon for facts; and of course Northcote was a very competent critic in painting.' He had lived in the house with Reynolds for five years as pupil or assistant, and continued to associate with him for sixteen years more. He had a minute acquaintance with the pictures of his master in every stage, and a thorough comprehension of their subtlest qualities. His lot was cast in the world of artists, and he knew the relation in which they stood to their President, and the opinions they entertained of him. Northcote's book is not unworthy of his opportunities. Though there is an occasional want of arrangement, and though the composition has none of the force and piquancy which distinguished his conversation, the particulars he relates are abundantly interesting, and fulfil the great end of all biography, that of conveying a complete idea of the hero of the tale.

The volumes of Northcote were followed in 1829 by the account which Allan Cunningham inserted in his 'Lives of the Painters.' This work is written in close imitation of the 'Lives of the Poets.' What Reynolds said of slavish mimicry in painting is equally true in literature, the model may be excellent, but the copy will be ridiculous.' The dogmatic and sententious style of Johnson was the natural product of a robust mind, throwing out comments upon books and men in the same vigorous form in which they were conceived. Allan Cunningham exaggerated the magisterial tone of his original, and employed it to give an imposing air to commonplaces and sophisms. The consequence is that there is frequently a ludicrous contrast Vol. 119.-No. 238. between

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between the insignificance of his ideas, and the oracular mode in which they are delivered. Johnson, again, abounds in weighty antithesis, and his copyist emulates him in such sentences as this:-'He who has been praised by Burke, and who was loved by Johnson, has little chance of being forgotten.' Nobody could outdo Johnson in his praise of Reynolds, or Burke in his love for him, and to allot praise to Burke, and love to Johnson, when both characteristics were united in each, was to sacrifice accuracy to a false sparkle of words. Nor could there be a more inane and misplaced reflection than to say that Reynolds had little chance of being forgotten because he had been praised by Burke and loved by Johnson, when he had won a far loftier immortality by his own exquisite works,-works which have hardly an inferior rank in painting to the productions of Burke and Johnson in literature. The frequent faults of style, however, were the least defect in Allan Cunningham's narrative. He had a bitter antipathy to the refined, amiable, and upright Reynolds, and, under the influence of this feeling, the biographer has told the story of his life very unfairly, and has converted one whose reputation is almost spotless, into a mean, envious, designing character. Leslie resolved to redress the wrong. had been the friend of many persons who were acquainted with Reynolds, he was familiar with the traditions which prevailed among artists, and everything he had heard or read' contradicted the degrading charges of Allan Cunningham. For several years Mr. Leslie wanted leisure to execute his project, and when, at last, he entered upon it in earnest, he was overtaken by death. The biography was left unfinished, and the manuscript was put into the hands of Mr. Taylor, that he might revise and complete it.

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Mr. Leslie and his editor had very different schemes. The first projected a life of Reynolds; the second conceived that the account of the individual ought to be accompanied by a general history of the times. This appears to us to be a fundamental mistake. Sir Joshua Reynolds lived for his art, and a select circle of friends. It would be difficult to name an eminent man who was less mixed up with the multifarious pursuits of the big and busy world around him.* The plan does injustice to Reynolds and to Leslie, as well as to the accomplished editor himself.

*The very qualities,' wrote Burke to Malone, May 22, 1795, 'which made the society of our friend so pleasant to all who knew him, are the very things that make it difficult to write his life, or to draw his character. The former part is peculiarly difficult, as it had little connection with great public events, nor was it diversified with much change of fortune, or much private adventure-hardly, indeed, any adventure at all. All that I could say of him I have said already in that short sketch which I printed after his death.'

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