Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 424, February 1851Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 424, February 1851
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
We have felt ourselves bound to say this much, because, if stories
of this sort are to be accepted as authentic contributions to
history, there is no imaginable kind of falsehood which may not
be promulgated as truth. Apply the rule to private life, and the
malignity of a discarded butler would be sufficient to taint the best
blood in England. What would we think of memoirs, compiled by some
man of considerable standing and celebrity, and published under the
editorship of his son, which should tell us that the present inheritor
of any noble title was a bastard and an intruder, on such authority
as this--that somebody had told the writer, that somebody else had
told him or her, that she was cognisant of a certain intrigue? Yet
the two cases are much the same. If they differ at all, it is in this
particular, that the original testimony of the "somebody," who in
the instance of the Queen of France was Madame Campan, happens to be
written and published, and to contain no insinuation whatever; whereas,
in the case we have supposed, that negative vindication would almost
certainly be wanting. Who, we ask, would dare, on such authority,
to set down such accusations against any private family? and, if we
are right in thinking that public indignation would most certainly
overwhelm the retailer of such miserable calumny, why should any other
rule be applied when royalty is the subject of the attack?
We suspect that Lord Holland's political friends will hardly thank his
successor for the publication of this volume. It exhibits the late peer
in what we must suppose to be his true colours, not as a constitutional
Whig, nor as in any way attached to the recognised forms of the British
Constitution, but as an admirer of principles which would necessarily
tend to its overthrow. We have searched the work in vain for a single
expression of anything which we can venture to designate as patriotic
feeling. Kings and courts are condemned by him--what sympathy he has
is bestowed on the agents of revolution--and he appears a eulogist,
or at least apologist, of the very man whom Whig and Tory alike have
agreed in branding with reprobation. The conduct of "Egalité," in
voting for the death of his cousin, Louis XVI., appears to him not
unnatural. He takes great pains to convince us that the infamous duke
was an exceedingly maligned person; and, with characteristic judgment
as to the nature of his evidence, cites "a short narrative written by
Mrs Elliott, who had, I believe, lived with him," as an apology for an
act which, even in the French Revolutionary Convention, called forth an
exclamation of horror.
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