and negligence which, however
trivial in themselves, tend to prove that the author is not always very
scrupulous in speaking of things he has not studied. A purist so severe
as to write "Kelt" for "Celt" ought not to call Mercury, originally a
very different personage from Hermes, one of "the legendary authors of
Greek civilisation" (p. 43); and we do not believe that anybody who had
read the writings of the two primates could call Bramhall "an inferior
counterpart of Laud" (p. 105). In a loftier mood, and therefore
apparently with still greater license, Mr. Goldwin Smith declares that
"the glorious blood of Orange could scarcely have run in a low
persecutor's veins" (p. 123). The blood of Orange ran in the veins of
William the Silent, the threefold hypocrite, who confessed Catholicism
whilst he hoped to retain his influence at court, Lutheranism when there
was a chance of obtaining assistance from the German princes, Calvinism
when he was forced to resort to religion in order to excite the people
against the crown, and who persecuted the Protestants in Orange and the
Catholics in Holland. These, however, are matters of no consequence
whatever in a political history of Ireland; but we find ourselves at
issue with the author on the important question of political freedom.
"Even the highly civilised Kelt of France, familiar as he is with
theories of political liberty, seems almost incapable of sustaining
free institutions. After a moment of constitutional government, he
reverts, with a bias which the fatalist might call irresistible, to
despotism in some form" (p. 18). The warning so frequently uttered by
Burke in his last years, to fly from the liberty of France, is still
more needful now that French liberty has exhibited itself in a far more
seductive light. The danger is more subtle, when able men confound
political forms with popular rights. France has never been governed by a
Constitution since 1792, if by a Constitution is meant a definite rule
and limitation of the governing power. It is not that the French failed
to preserve the forms of parliamentary government, but that those forms
no more implied freedom than the glory which the Empire has twice given
in their stead. It is a serious fault in our author that he has not
understood so essential a distinction. Has he not read the _Rights of
Man_, by Tom Paine?--

It is not because a part of the government is elective that makes it
less a despotism, if the per