o figure are so
misunderstood and misrepresented, that the result is a complete
mystification, and the perusal of the narrative about as profitable to
an Englishman as reading the Republic of Plato or the Utopia of More,
the pages of Gaudentio di Lucca or the adventures of Peter Wilkins.

The influence of races in our early ages, of the church in our middle,
and of parties in our modern history, are three great moving and
modifying powers, that must be pursued and analyzed with an untiring,
profound, and unimpassioned spirit, before a guiding ray can be secured.
A remarkable feature of our written history is the absence in its pages
of some of the most influential personages. Not one man in a thousand
for instance has ever heard of Major Wildman: yet he was the soul of
English politics in the most eventful period of this kingdom, and one
most interesting to this age, from 1640 to 1688; and seemed more than
once to hold the balance which was to decide the permanent form of
our government. But he was the leader of an unsuccessful party. Even,
comparatively speaking, in our own times, the same mysterious oblivion
is sometimes encouraged to creep over personages of great social
distinction as well as political importance.

The name of the second Pitt remains, fresh after forty years of great
events, a parliamentary beacon. He was the Chatterton of politics; the
"marvellous boy." Some have a vague impression that he was mysteriously
moulded by his great father: that he inherited the genius, the
eloquence, the state craft of Chatham. His genius was of a different
bent, his eloquence of a different class, his state craft of a different
school. To understand Mr Pitt, one must understand one of the suppressed
characters of English history, and that is Lord Shelburne.

When the fine genius of the injured Bolingbroke, the only peer of his
century who was educated, and proscribed by the oligarchy because they
were afraid of his eloquence, "the glory of his order and the shame,"
shut out from Parliament, found vent in those writings which recalled
to the English people the inherent blessings of their old free monarchy,
and painted in immortal hues his picture of a patriot king, the spirit
that he raised at length touched the heart of Carteret born a whig, yet
sceptical of the advantages of that patrician constitution which made
the Duke of Newcastle the most incompetent of men, but the chosen leader
of the Venetian party, virtuall