ttres_), was a man of the finest
character, the friend of most of the great men of letters at Edinburgh
in the age of Scott and Jeffrey, and the author of an excellent _History
of Scotland_ from Alexander the Third to the Union of the Crowns. He was
born in 1791, was called to the Scotch Bar in 1813, and died young for a
historian (a class which has so much to do with Time that he is apt to
be merciful to it) in 1849. He was perhaps hardly a man of genius, but
he commanded universal respect. Sir Archibald Alison was the son of a
clergyman of the same name, who, after taking orders in England and
holding some benefices there, became known as the author of _Essays on
the Principles of Taste_, which possess a good deal of formal and some
real merit. Archibald the younger was highly distinguished at the
University of Edinburgh, was called to the Scotch Bar, and distinguished
himself there also, being ultimately appointed Sheriff of Lanarkshire.
Like most of the brighter wits among his immediate contemporaries in
Scotland (we have the indisputable testimony of Jeffrey to the fact)
Alison was an out-and-out Tory, and a constant contributor to
_Blackwood_, while his literary activity took very numerous shapes. At
last he began, and in the twenty years from 1839 to 1859 carried
through, a _History of Europe during the French Revolution_, completed
by one of _Europe from the Fall of the First to the Accession of the
Third Napoleon_. He died in 1867. It was rather unfortunate for Alison
that he did not undertake this great work until the period of Liberal
triumph which marked the middle decades of the century had well set in.
It was still more unlucky, and it could less be set down to the
operations of unkind chance, that in many of the qualifications of the
writer in general, and the historical writer in particular, he was
deficient. He had energy and industry; he was much less inaccurate than
it was long the fashion to represent him; a high sense of patriotism and
the political virtues generally, a very fair faculty of judging
evidence, and a thorough interest in his subject were his. But his book
was most unfortunately diffuse, earning its author the _sobriquet_ of
"Mr. Wordy," and it was conspicuously lacking in grasp, both in the
marshalling of events and in the depicting of characters. Critics, even
when they sympathised, have never liked it; but contrary to the wont of
very lengthy histories, it found considerable favour wit