not because they were Roman Catholics, but because, in addition to being Catholics, the newly-enfranchised voters were anti-English in sentiment. The masses in Ireland had never become reconciled to the rule of the Saxon invader, they were permeated with an intense spirit of nationalism, which, so long as they were powerless to give expression to it, remained a harmless sentiment, but which, so soon as they were placed in a position to give effect to it, became a real source of danger. The harm lay in the admission, not of Roman Catholics, but of the disloyal, to the franchise ; and the Roman Catholics, from causes we need not here discuss, were, unfortunately, disloyal. It was the knowledge of this fact that convinced Clare of the inevitable necessity for a Union, from the moment of the passing of the Relief Act. He knew that the sham freedom, which might please a people while they were powerless to secure a more real liberty, would cease to satisfy that people when the weapon of the franchise was once placed in their hands. He saw that demands would ere long be made, wholly inconsistent with the arrangement of 1782, which must prove absolutely subversive of the system of management of Irish affairs from London, and must ultimately lead to a really dangerous separatist movement.

Such are, we think, a few of the conclusions which may be fairly drawn from the narrative furnished by Mr. Lecky. They show that the Act of Union was not merely desirable, but that it was practically forced upon Pitt by the compulsion of circumstances, by the ominous development under the Grattan Parliament of principles and impulses absolutely antagonistic to Imperial unity. But the pages of this authentic history do more than justify the expediency of the Union as a measure designed to avert the danger which in 1800 imminently threatened the destruction of the integrity of the Empire. The period of the Grattan Parliament has been fondly described as the golden age of Ireland. Irishmen to-day love to look back to those times, to recal the forgotten splendours of the Irish capital, the brilliancy of Irish society, the distinction of the Viceregal court. They are proud to revive the memories of more enduring national glories; to dwell upon the glowing eloquence of Flood and Grattan, of Curran and Plunket; to laud the calmer patriotism of Charlemont, and to rejoice in many ways in the recollections of the epoch of their country's liberty. We have shown that this freedom was but a phantom, and that the vain-glorious references of Irishmen of to-day to the short-lived independence of their country, are dreams and delusions which only Irish patriotism could accustom itself to

believe

believe in. But for Irishmen who truly love their country, still more for Englishmen who desire duly to discharge their responsibilities to Ireland, a still more important lesson is to be learned. Studiously as Mr. Lecky has suppressed all indications of his personal opinions on contemporary Irish politics, careful as he has been to give a judicial and impartial tone to his comments upon the facts he has recounted, it is impossible for any fair-minded reader to miss the moral of his pages. The Grattan Parliament was an experiment in concession to Irish ideas, tried under precautions and limitations, which could not now by any possibility be imposed upon any parallel endowment of the demands of Irish nationalism. If a body so loyal in the sentiments of most of its members, so conservative in its instincts, so ballasted by solid and orderly classes, which have now lost all influence over Irish society, and have almost entirely disappeared, could plunge the country into the chaos of a bloody rebellion, what guarantees can the most credulous Englishmen find in the fair promises of modern agitators for the security of the connection and the peace of the island, under an independent Parliament of the type which modern Home Rulers would alone be content to greet? And, assuming the attachment of the present leaders, whoever they are, of the Irish race to the Constitutional Union, through the Crown, with Great Britain, who can say that they will exercise a more potent, restraining influence upon the populace than did Grattan and Charlemont, the idolized leaders of the last century? We discern in this history the fullest confirmation of those ideas of Irish policy which throughout the whole of the present century, until 1885, were held by every English statesman, and which are still cherished by the majority of the English people, and guarded by the leaders of the Unionist party. The danger of concession, when concession is not made safe by the firm hand of a resolute ruler, is abundantly illustrated in the history of those twenty years of nominal independence. If the lessons, which have been given so often since 1868, of the results of weakness of purpose in dealing with the Irish people, have not availed to convince any Englishman who will candidly study them of the criminal folly of withdrawing from Ireland the benefits of a firm and fixed Government, the story of the Relief Act of 1793 and the Fitzwilliam incident should serve to show to what uses a too generous and confiding trust in Irish gratitude will be put by the more turbulent of Ireland's patriots. If there are those whom the criminal intimidation practised in Ireland during the last ten years has not been sufficient to impress with a sense of the untrustworthiness of

the

the Irish people when not effectively controlled by civilized laws, if the agrarian crimes that have stained the soil of Ireland through the century are not sufficient to indicate the spirit in which the larger section of the inhabitants regard the minority, the horrid story of the Rebellion and the atrocities committed in it, a hundred years ago, sufficiently prove that the fears of Irish loyalists as to their fate in an independent Ireland are not without historical justification.

We would close this review as we began it, by expressing our sense of the magnitude of the obligation under which Mr. Lecky has placed the whole thinking public of Great Britain and Ireland by his faithful narration of the true history of this eventful period, and especially by his labours in unfolding the hitherto imperfectly known story of the Rebellion and the passing of the Union. We do not think that this work has greatly enlarged our general knowledge of the broad facts of the case. To Irishmen, at all events, those facts have long been fairly familiar. But by the fulness and accuracy with which he has set out the details which his industry has discovered, Mr. Lecky has rescued the story of the Union from the risk of further misrepresentation. No writer in the public press, no speaker on a political platform, may any longer pretend to give credence to the time-honoured misconceptions of the character of the Grattan Parliament, which have so long been suffered to pass without authoritative contradiction. We commend these volumes to the attentive perusal of every one who desires a right knowledge of a crucial period of Irish history, and a clear conception of the character of Irish national sentiment. And we believe that no reader who approaches the work in a fair spirit will withhold his assent, as he closes Mr. Lecky's pages, from the historian's concluding remark, that the most conspicuous lesson to be drawn from Irish failure is the folly of conferring power where it is certain to be misused, and of weakening, in the interests of any political theory, or speculation, those great pillars of social order on which all true liberty and all real progress ultimately depend.'

ART.

ART. II.-1. Studies in European History, being Academical Addresses delivered by JOHN IGNATIUS VON DÖLLINGER, D.D., late Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Munich. Translated at the request of the Author by Margaret Warre. London, 1890.

2. Briefe und Erklärungen von J. von Döllinger über die Vaticanischen Decrete, 1869-1887. Munich, 1890.

3. The Pope and the Council. By Janus. English translation.. London, 1869.

THE

HE year which has just closed has deprived the religious world of two of its most conspicuous figures, Newman and Döllinger. Born within a year of each other,* they ended their long pilgrimage of nearly ninety years at an interval of a few months. They had seen three generations of

To

the reign of Napoleon, the Revolution of 1848, the Vatican Decrees. To the one, outward events were but the waves beating against the ship of the Church; to the other, they were a part of the discipline of the Church, ordained as she was to mingle with and colour the stream of human affairs. The one began his life as a member of a ' schismatic' Church, and ended it in peaceful possession of the highest Roman dignity; the other commenced his long career of study as a defender of the Roman Church, and died excommunicate. the one, authority was the ultimate judge; to the other, reason also was the guide of conscience and the interpreter of authority: and in this difference lies the separation between their minds and their fortunes. A little more or less, and Newman might have been the outcast and Döllinger the Cardinal; for it is partly choice and partly chance which ranges Erasmus and Pascal on the side of Rome, and Calvin in the opposite camp. But the difference between the minds of the two men who have passed away was deeper than can be expressed by the dignities or the anathemas of the Roman Church, and the end of each was the natural result of the life. Newman was acute, imaginative, logical; content with the deductive method even to paradox; occupied more with the problems of humanity than those of history, and interested rather in religion than theology; a poet, not a man of massive learning-a more beautiful, if not a more venerable, figure than Döllinger. Newman will be remembered when Döllinger is forgotten, for the sacred fire of genius burns in all that he wrote, and he helps men to feel by feeling with them. But as a man of learning and a historian (and

* Newman was born Feb. 21, 1800; Döllinger, Feb. 27, 1799. Vol. 172.-No. 343.

D

Döllinger

Döllinger acknowledged his merit in that line of literature) Newman cannot be mentioned in the same category as Döllinger. To Newman, indeed, it may be said that legend was as good as history, when the character of a saint or a period of the Church was concerned; not that he was indifferent to the claims of truth, or unfair in judging the adverse cause, but because to his mind the supernatural was as familiar as the natural, and he did not apply rigid tests to facts, the outcome of which fell in with his belief. He was always true to logic, but he did not always insist on the validity of his premisses. And so, though as we read him we are dazzled and hurried along, half consenting, by a magnificent display of rhetoric in logical forms, our assent is won rather by force than by persuasion. Take, for instance, one of the finest passages to be found in Newman's works, the comparison in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine' of the Church of Rome in modern times with the primitive Church of Christ. The parallel is admirably drawn, but it contains only points of agreement, and with a few alterations of facts it might apply as well to Quakerism or Judaism as to Catholicism. The method of cumulative argument is a favourite one with Newman; and there is no method in which the premisses have to be more carefully weighed.

This is not the case with Döllinger. His arguments carry conviction by weight, not brilliancy. He surveys the whole field, and he is one of the few who have the right to say, as he did, that some historical inductions are of the nature of mathematical proof. Broad, rational, and practical, his intelligence comprehends not a view nor a portion, but the whole of his subject. He knows the facts and what has been said of them. He is a historian rather of the type of Ranke than of Mommsen or Stubbs; a scholar whose knowledge is powerful by its extent and depth, rather than by the glance of genius, or by the force of accuracy and the insistence of detail. It might be interesting to speculate what would have been Döllinger's career if he had lived in Berlin instead of Munich, and had been brought up as a Protestant. The theologian in him, to some extent, cramped the historian, at least in choice of subjects. But though he cared much for dogma, he cared more for truth. He deserved the praise given him by the University of Oxford in 1871, that in treating controversies he had accomplished the difficult task of showing himself rather a judge than a litigant.' He deals with Church questions of the early and Middle Ages as freely as Milman, and (in his later works at least) from much the same point of view.

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