The last of our four living writers dealing with Marlborough is Mr Alison--a gentleman who has conferred world-wide service, and earned an enduring celebrity in English letters, by the fidelity and power with which he has recorded the mightiest series of events which the world has hitherto seen, and enforced their true teaching. That his _History of Europe_ is not open to criticism, it were childishness to deny; but the _maculæ_ totally disappear when set against his uniform and even fastidious fidelity, his prodigious industry, his dispassionate candour in dealing with men and events, his huge accumulation of important, instructive, and deeply-interesting facts--which, but for him, might have been irrecoverably scattered abroad--and his vivid and picturesque eloquence. Few must they be of his readers who have not hung breathless over his battle-scenes on flood and field; hearing again the awful roar of the cannonade, the deadly rattle of musketry, the thundering charge of cavalry, the steady tramp of vast columns of infantry; beholding the glistening of sabre and bayonet, and all the bloody scene, now fearfully visible, and then, again, as fearfully invisible, for a while, amid the sulphurous smoke! Again, Mr Alison always _places_ his attentive reader well, before entering into the battle or siege; giving him an admirable, idea of localities, without a knowledge of which his picture would become like the cloudy but glistening confusion of the later productions of Turner. All this, however, is subordinate to the moral and political aspect of those turbulent times and multitudinous transactions with which Mr Alison had to deal--an aspect which he keeps steadily before his reader's eye, and thus instructs while delighting him; making the past truly and practically tributary to the future. He is ever watchful of the effect produced on affairs, civil or military, by overmastering personal character, which, with its workings, he develops patiently and distinctly: and so with combinations of men and parties; with systems of policy abruptly changed, or subtilely varied to suit purposes, and gain objects, not at first sight visible or easily suspected. Either by natural constitution or from long habit, there may be observed in Mr Alison a disposition to take large views of human affairs--to deal with mankind and their transactions in masses, and on a grand scale--a tendency this, which, if accompanied by accurate thinking, and due attention to details, proportionably indicates the highest order of historical genius. But we must repeat the remark, and with it close these general observations, that Mr Alison's capital qualification as an author, especially a biographical and historical author, appears to us to be his unvarying love of truth, in comparison with which all other objects which can be contemplated by an author are absolutely as nothing.