The author of this history is all English nobleman of large historical acquirements, who has managed to produce two or three valuable works demanding great study and research, without interfering with his duties as a member of Parliament, though, doubtless with some interference with his pleasures as a member of the English aristocracy. The present work is valuable for its accuracy, and interesting from its giving a connected view of the history of England during a period but little known except by the empty abstracts of stupid compilers, or the brilliant but prejudiced letters and memoirs of contemporary writers and statesmen. It comprehends the administrations of Harley and Bolingbroke, of Stanhope, Walpole, Carteret, Newcastle and Chatham, thus including the latter years of the reign of Queen Anne and the reigns of George I. and II. The period covers a wide field of characters and events, and Lord Mahon has been especially successful in unraveling the threads of the foreign policy of England, and indicating the difficulties experienced by her statesmen in sustaining the House of Hanover on the throne. In a narrative point of view the best portions of the history are those relating to the rebellions of 1715 and 1745. It is almost needless to say that Professor Reed has added much to the value and interest of the work by his elucidative notes. But the richness of Lord Mahon’s materials and the interest of his subject cannot conceal the fact that he lacks both the heart and the brain of an able historian, and that he is essentially a common-place man. The reflections he appends to some of his narratives are commonly such obvious truisms, or such poor apologies for reason, that the reader is made painfully aware of his being in the company of a mediocre gentleman, who, while he always means well, never means much. Lord Mahon is deficient equally in historical science and historical imagination, and his work equally barren of profound principles and vivid pictures. A moderate tory, he holds the hearsays of his creed with a lazy acquiescence, without sufficient passion to be a bigot, and without sufficient logic to be a sophist. When he is tempted into historical parallels, or disquisitions on the changes of parties, as in that passage where he essays to prove that a modern whig is synonymous with a tory of Queen Anne’s day, he adopts the argumentation of Fluellen rather than Chillingworth—shows that “there is a mountain in Wales and a mountain in Macedon,” and leaves the reader to mourn over the misdirection of the human faculties. In his estimate of literature he is still worse. The disquisition on the literature of Queen Anne’s time, in the present history, is a medley of mingled commonplace, which has been worn to rags, and critical nonsense, which has been long exploded. His history, therefore, must be considered simply as a useful narrative of important events, and carefully distinguished from those of Guizot and