Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 423, January 1851Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 423, January 1851
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Miss Strickland's partiality for the Stuart and aversion to the
Tudor race, may be explained by another and still more honourable
circumstance. It is the inevitable effect of a long course of
injustice, whether in the rulers of men, or the judges of those rulers,
the annalists of their lives, to produce in the end a reaction in
the general mind. This is more particularly the case in persons like
Miss Strickland, actuated by generous and elevated feelings, and who
feel conscious of power to redress much of the injustice which the
long-continued ascendency of a particular party, whether in religion
or politics, has inflicted on the characters of History. Nowhere has
this injustice been more strongly experienced than in Great Britain
during the last two centuries. The popular party in politics, and
the reformed in religion, having in both these countries, after a
sanguinary struggle, been successful, and a family seated on the throne
which embodied, and in a manner personified, both these triumphs,
nearly the whole historians who treated of the period for a century and
a half were entirely one-sided. When Hume wrote his immortal history,
he complained, with justice, that for seventy years power, reward, and
emolument had been confined to one party in the state, and that the
sources of History had in consequence been irremediably corrupted. His
rhetorical powers and impartial spirit did much to remedy the evil, but
he had not industry and research sufficient to do the whole. Much was
left to the just feelings, and generous because disinterested effort,
of the high-minded who succeeded him in the path of historical inquiry.
Mr Tytler's great and authentic _History of Scotland_, and Lingard's
able and valuable, though one-sided, _History of England_, have gone
far to give the opposite side of the picture which Malcolm Laing
and Burnet had painted in so vehement a party spirit, and Macaulay
has since continued with such remarkable historical power. But much
remained yet to be done. Antiquarian industry, chivalrous zeal, have of
late brought many of the concealed or suppressed treasures of History
to light; and it is those which Miss Strickland proposes to embody in
her _Queens of Scotland_.
Of the general plan which she proposes to adopt in this work, our
author gives the following admirable account:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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