The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886Various
History
The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886
Various
Periodicals
3. _On the State of Society in France before the Revolution of 1789._
Translated by Henry Reeve. Second Edition. London, 1873.
4. _Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with
Nassau W. Senior, 1834-59._ London, 1872.
5. _On the Government of Dependencies._ By Sir George Cornewall Lewis.
London, 1841.
6. _On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion._ By the Same.
London, 1849.
7. _A Dialogue on the best Form of Government._ By the Same. London,
1863.
8. _The English Constitution._ By Walter Bagehot. Revised Edition.
London, 1883.
Of the latest Work on the Characteristics of Democracy we are precluded
from speaking, as Sir Henry Maine's valuable Essays first appeared in
the pages of this Review. But we desire on the present occasion to call
attention to some writers on the subject, who are almost unknown to a
younger generation, or known only by occasional references made to them
by those who were well acquainted with the writers and their works. And
among these half-forgotten names few perhaps will recur more frequently
in the recollections of the best-informed men of from forty-five to
sixty, or more surprise those who have entered on life since their
owners left it, than those of Alexis de Tocqueville, Nassau William
Senior, and Walter Bagehot. Among the statesmen of the last generation,
few who will fill so small a space in history are so often or so
reverently quoted by those who remember Lord Palmerston's Government,
the Crimean War, and the Indian Mutiny, as Sir George Cornewall Lewis.
Most men under forty will hear with surprise that in the City, at least,
he was deemed a sounder and safer financier than Mr. Gladstone; honoured
as the Chancellor of the Exchequer who first redeemed the financial
reputation of the Whigs from the discredit that had clung to the party
of retrenchment and reform for a whole generation. Of the small minority
who know him as the founder of the English school of historical
sceptics, how many have heard of his multifarious literary and political
works, or his shrewd, genial, two-edged, criticisms on public and social
life? It seems too probable that our grandchildren will retain nothing
of his save the characteristic saying, that 'life would be very
tolerable but for its pleasures;' and _that_, probably, will be assigned
to some more famous and far less wise _causeur_ or phrasemaker, losing
half its force in the transfer. Even Mill is known to the passing and
the rising generation by different works and diverse characteristics. To
the one he is little more than the greatest, most original, and most
heretical of English economists; a standard author on logic and
metaphysics. The other prefers to remember him by his later and lesser
writings; those sexagenarian and posthumous Essays, in which the riper
wisdom of a mind, very slow to learn the lessons of practical life, was
gathered, and the wilder errors of his earlier theories modified or
corrected.
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