iven. I am sure that no moderately intelligent one
will fail, with a very little trouble, to take delight in them. I do
not know whether an artful generaliser could get anything out of the
circumstances in which the best of them grew; I should say myself that
nothing more than the system of government, the conditions of the
electorate and the legislature, and the existence from time to time of
a superheated state in political feeling, can or need be collected. In
some respects, to my own taste, the first of these examples is also
the best. To Halifax full justice has never been done, for we have had
no capable historian of the late seventeenth century but Macaulay, and
Halifax's defect of fervour as a Jacobite was more than made up to
Macaulay by his defect of fervour as a Williamite. As for the moderns,
I have myself more than once failed to induce editors of 'series' to
give Halifax a place. Yet Macaulay himself has been fairer to the
great Trimmer than to most persons with whom he was not in full
sympathy. The weakness of Halifax's position is indeed obvious. When
you run first to one side of the boat and then to the other, you have
ten chances of sinking to one of trimming her. To hold fast to one
party only, and to keep that from extremes, is the only secret, and it
is no great disgrace to Halifax, that in the very infancy of the party
and parliamentary system, he did not perceive it. But this hardly
interferes at all with the excellence of his pamphlets. The polished
style, the admirable sense, the subdued and yet ever present wit, the
avoidance of excessive cleverness (the one thing that the average
Briton will not stand), the constant eye on the object, are
unmistakable. They are nearly as forcible as Dryden's political and
controversial prefaces, which are pamphlets themselves in their way,
and they excel them in knowledge of affairs, in urbanity, in
adaptation to the special purpose. In all these points they resemble
more than anything else the pamphlets of Paul Louis Courier, and
there can be no higher praise than this.

No age in English history was more fertile in pamphlets than the
reigns of William and of Anne. Some men of real distinction
occasionally contributed to them, and others (such as Ferguson and
Maynwaring) obtained such literary notoriety as they possess by their
means. The total volume of the kind produced during the quarter of a
century between the Revolution and the accession of George the F