Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
But truth is great, and will prevail. Those just views of modern
society, which neither the luminous eye of Robertson, nor the learned
research and philosophic mind of Sismondi could reach, have been
brought forward by a writer of surpassing ability, whose fame as an
historian and a philosopher is for the time overshadowed by the more
fleeting celebrity of the statesman and the politician. We will not
speak of M. GUIZOT in the latter character, much as we are tempted to
do so, by the high and honourable part which he has long borne in
European diplomacy, and the signal ability with which, in the midst of
a short-sighted and rebellious generation, clamouring, as the Romans
of old, for the _multis utile bellum_, he has sustained his
sovereign's wise and magnanimous resolution to maintain peace. We are
too near the time to appreciate the magnitude of these blessings; men
would not now believe through what a crisis the British empire,
unconscious of its danger, passed, when M. Thiers was dismissed, three
years and a half ago, by Louis Philippe, and M. Guizot called to the
helm. But when the time arrives, as arrive it will, that the
diplomatic secrets of that period are brought to light; when the
instructions of the revolutionary minister to the admiral of the
Toulon fleet are made known, and the marvellous chance which prevented
their being acted upon by him, has become matter of history; it will
be admitted, that the civilized world have good cause to thank M.
Guizot for saving it from a contest as vehement, as perilous, and
probably as disastrous to all concerned, as that which followed the
French Revolution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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