Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/426

408 all sides it became quite evident that our glory was departing." Surely Mr. Grenville would have been too happy to make Alison a Secretary of State, and his own right-hand man, had they but been condoling contemporaries. He would have made the most of Alison's eloquent warnings as to the mournful parallels that obtain between the culmination and decay of individual life and of national life, of the man and of the state. Let us rather hope with Edmund Burke, that there may be fallacy in the speculative assumption that necessarily, and by the constitution of things, all states have the same periods of infancy, manhood, and decrepitude that are found in the individuals who compose them. "Parallels of this sort," said Burke, "rather furnish similitudes to illustrate or to adorn, than supply analogies from whence to reason. The objects which are attempted to be forced into an analogy are not found in the same classes of existence. …. Commonwealths are not physical but moral essences.” And though it is right that nations, as well as individual men, should not be high-minded but fear, and while thinking they stand to take heed lest they fall, and while rejoicing in prosperity to rejoice with trembling,—we will trust, from current evidences of national spirit, principle, and honour, pace Sir Archibald Alison and his tabular testimonies per contrà, that old England is not yet going, going, gone, to the dogs; but retains stamina enough to survive, and by surviving to refute, his elegiac statistics.

Passing from characteristic matter to characteristic manner, we must own that we have met with admirers of Alison's style. They even avowed themselves fascinated thereby to go on with him to the Finis of vol. xx. Good souls, we envied their unbilious temperament. Dr. Arnold insists on the impression produced by an historian's style as a thing by no means to be despised, in deciding upon his historical merits. If the style, says Arnold, is heavy and cumbrous, it indicates either a dull man, or a pompous man, or at least a slow and awkward man; if it be tawdry and full of commonplaces enunciated with great solemnity, the writer is most likely a silly man. That the "Historian of Europe"—a title imposingly pompous—is something pompous, is by some affirmed, and by many assumed. That he is a dull man, only faction or prejudice will aver, except with saving clauses, or in a perversion of the term dulness from its popular usage. That he is a silly man is à fortiori an untenable proposition—a pons asinorum it would prove to the silly-billies who might attempt to demonstrate it. Nevertheless, though questionably pompous, only occasionally dull, and in no allowable sense silly, our historian's style is often "heavy," not very rarely "cumbrous," and in countless instances is "tawdry and full of commonplaces enunciated with great solemnity." So tawdry, that the tasteless are enraptured. So commonplace that the commonalty are charmed. So solemn that the stolid are awed and overpowered.

Gibbon has recorded in a passage immortal as his History, the time and place of his "inspired" resolve to narrate the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Sir Archibald Alison has indited a similar passage on his own account, and wrought it up into the body of his narrative; similar at least in scope, not in form or substance; for Alison is no Gibbon, and