Page:Englishhistorica36londuoft.djvu/285

 1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 277 of extensive researches carried on by him for many years. He is thus enabled, all being well, to hold out the prospect of the publication, at no distant date, of the second part of the second volume of his history, to which he has given the sub-title of The Age of Walpole. The present instalment, though of ample dimensions, strictly speaking, covers a period of hardly more than three years, from the resignation of Townshend and Walpole (in April 1717) to their readmission to office and the reunion of the whig party (in May 1720), at the time of the ' consentaneous ' event which at the time attracted a very much larger share of public attention —the reconciliation between King George I and his heir. But, apart from the fact that Professor Michael's narrative, of which completeness is one of the most distinctive characteristics, includes some chapters of a more or less introductory kind, it almost scrupulously avoids digressions from its actual theme — the crisis of the Hanoverian monarchy, to which its domestic and its foreign difficulties were alike contributory. Part i of this Age of Walpole would, of course, not be appropriately named if it were to stand alone ; for it is in no sense illustrative of his greatness except as a parliamentary orator and debater ; and his most conspicuous triumph in this capacity, his speech against the Peerage Bill, virtually, though not technically, put an end to the political period with which these pages deal. The period in question was that of the ' triumvirate ', during which the conduct of our foreign policy was really in the hands of Stanhope, in so far as it cannot be said to have been directed by the king himself and the Hanoverian junta, in which Bernstorff's was the leading influence. Even as a financier, though his reputation was already great, Walpole's fame primarily rests on the episode in the midst of which Stanhope sank, and on which was founded the long-enduring ascendancy of his successor and the policy with which he was, to his enduring honour, identified. The instalment of Dr. Michael's work now in our hands is, therefore, in a sense but the prologue to that to which we rejoice to be able to look forward. But this fact is far from diminishing its intrinsic interest as a narrative, without a parallel in its fullness and in the extensiveness of the research on which it is based, of a period in which the foreign policy of Great Britain dominated the affairs of Europe, while her system of internal government definitively determined itself on the lines to which, though not without deflexions, it subsequently adhered. No historian, English or foreign, has so well succeeded as Dr. Michael in tracing the intimate relations between the two main aspects of British history in these years — and this not only because of the augmentation which has taken place in the materials at the disposal of historians from Rapin to Lord Stanhope, and even since the time when the latter, in a work of which the merits remain as notable as the defects, dealt with the brilliant achievements of the most illustrious of his ancestors. If the present volume could not have been written without the aid of our Record Office (which will forgive a passing criticism of its arrangement) and other home collections, both public and private, these sources have been here supplemented by the relations of foreign diplomatic agents — more especially those of the Austrian Resident, J. P. Hoffmann, whose observation could not but be