English law, upon the attention of all biographers and historians. Not that we think this to have been rendered necessary by any recent and glaring cases--for we know of none whatever among English men of letters, in the departments just referred to, in which we have detected any _intention_ to slander the dead, or misrepresent the living. We indignantly repudiate the bare possibility; and only desire to impress the necessity of a caution all but excessive, in making derogatory imputations upon the dead, through placing too great a reliance upon the tittle-tattle of days gone by, written or spoken; upon the means of knowledge possessed by those who gave currency to discreditable rumours; and the trustworthiness of contemporaries, often eager rivals outwitted in the game, and distanced in the race of life and distinction, by him whom they thereupon revengefully resolve to blacken before the eyes of posterity. We concur, in a word, cordially with Lord Mahon in saying that which we are bound to add he has uniformly acted up to, in his candid, luminous, and elegant _History_: "Unjustly to lower the fame of a political adversary, or unjustly to raise the fame of an ancestor--to state any fact without sufficient authority, or draw any character without thorough conviction, implies not merely literary failure, _but moral guilt_."[5] [3] ALISON, vol. ii. p. 320. [4] Mr Alison seems to attribute this speech, or a similar one, to Lord Bolingbroke. [5] _History of England, from the Peace of Utrecht to that of Aix-la-Chapelle_, vol. i. p. 3. That the Duke of Marlborough is one of the foremost figures in the picture of England's glory, in that radiant quarter crowded by her warriors and statesmen, is undeniable; and so is Lord Bacon, who stands forth among her philosophers a very giant. But would any biographer or historian deal justly, who failed to apprise us of the real blot upon the character of each? Surely, however, he would not dwell upon that blot with eagerness or exultation! but point it out in the spirit of a benignant sadness--in the reluctant discharge of a painful duty--and that only after having deliberately weighed everything that a judicial mind would require, before arriving at a conclusion so humiliating to humanity.